


Six Senses

by lolcat202



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-13
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2018-12-01 20:30:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 25,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11494173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lolcat202/pseuds/lolcat202
Summary: Regina is losing her sight but meets a doctor who changes her perspective on what she's lost, and what she still stands to gain.





	1. Chapter 1

Silence. It envelops her, soothes her, cocoons her. Silence is her enemy, and her dearest friend. In the silence, she can conjure up images of days gone by, picture a hummingbird steadily beating its wings at her mother’s bottlebrush plants. She can call up stories, songs, poetry read before the words became too blurry on the page. She can breathe in slowly, in and out, listen to the echo of her lungs expanding. She can just be, rather than trying to struggle through the daily reminders of what she’s lost.

She can just  _be_. 

The waiting room is silent; none of that piped-in elevator music, no gossiping techs and receptionists hashing over their love lives. She’s alone, more or less - she can still make out enough light and dark to know that there are no bodies in the chairs opposite her, but more than that, she can feel the still of the air. Besides, it’s nearly 6:00. The late appointments have come and gone, carrying with them whatever news - good or bad - the doctor had to offer. It’s just Regina, sitting silently with Emma, waiting for her last chance, for the best macular dystrophy specialist in the country to flash a light that she can barely see into her eyes, and lay down his pronouncement. 

Before he comes out, she’ll relish the silence. 

She hears the nurse, rubber soles padding almost imperceptibly on the shitty tile floors that have lined every doctor’s office since Regina’s vision first started to blur. She feels the whoosh of air that accompanies the opening door. The nurse calls her name, but Regina hesitates for a second, her nails digging into the cheap pressed wood arms of the chair in the waiting room, before Emma prods her gently.

“They’re waiting for you,” her friend says. Fingers curl over her own, and Regina relaxes her grip. Whatever this man has to say, she can stand it. She pushes herself off the sticky vinyl – dark blue, she knows, doctors always have the same crappy chairs – and smoothes a skirt that she can only imagine has no wrinkles. Emma stands next to her and cups her elbow gently. “Once more, into the breach,” she whispers softly. Regina can’t help but laugh, a deep, hollow chuckle that barely escapes her lips, as she lets herself be led into yet another exam room.

The fluorescent lights hum softly, and Regina catches herself humming along with them. She’d heard before that people who lose one sense become attuned to the rest, but she’d never truly understood what it meant until her vision failed her. Now, she hears music in everything, even in the quiet of an exam room. Emma breathes in and out, taps her feet impatiently, a sharp staccato against the tile floor. The room itself sings to her, and Regina taps fingers on both hands against the paper liner on the exam table. One hand echoing Emma’s breathing, the other beating in time to the vibrating lights. A discordant melody, but it echoes in her mind. Beats in time. Music in quiet. Life, echoing all around her, even in the darkness.

Again, the rush of a door opening. She makes out the blurry shape  of the doctor before he closes the door, before his white lab coat blends into the antiseptic walls of the exam room. She cocks her chin toward him and squares her shoulders. Ready for the latest in a long series of exams that have led nowhere.

“Ms. Mills,” he says, “I’m Dr. Locksley.”

A sharp intake of breath – her ears register the sound long before her brain realizes that it comes from her.  _Dr. Locksley_. She’s grown used to the music of empty air, but she’s not used to this. His voice – not quite baritone, soft, heavily accented from what she guesses is the suburbs of London. Not what she expected to find here in the heart of Boston. He rests a hand on her knee. It’s not sexual, she knows that now. It’s merely to alert her to his presence, to allow her other senses to find him. Still, she clutches her thighs a little bit tighter. Emma clears her throat, and even in that small gesture, Regina fears she’s been too obvious. He’s her doctor, for Christ’s sake. He’s her doctor, and he could be 90 years old and riddled with tumors.

He’s not. Blame it on her other senses, but she knows he’s not.

Shuffling of papers, of another file spelling out her history, carefully written in Emma’s chicken-scratch handwriting. “I see you’ve been diagnosed with macular dystrophy,” he says, keeping his tone light. She can hear it though, in the words he’s not saying, that she should know by now that she’s never going to see again, that anything he tells her is going to be delivered in a pitying tone.

“Yes,” she says, “but you’re the best-“

He cuts her off, “Please, don’t. People come to me because they say I’m the best, but then they have their hearts broken when I can’t help them. Can we just say that I’m good at what I do?”

She can hear the grin in his voice, can picture it. Even white teeth biting his lower lip, smile lines highlighting his own perfect eyes. Would they be blue? She decides they would. The beauty of losing her sight – everything that she imagines is true. No lab coat – jeans and a beat-up jacket. Maybe a bit of a scruffy beard. She clears her own throat, suddenly at a loss for words, and she can feel Emma’s smirk. Damn her. Next time, she’s bringing a dog.

Still, she’s not one to give in to girlish fantasies, not even when she was a girl. “I can’t say you’re good at what you do until you do it,” she shoots back, and immediately regrets the words when they earn her a coughing spasm from the chair next to her. Definitely a dog next time.

His laugh runs from his chest to the fingertips that still rest lightly on her knee, and the vibration echoes up her spine. She shifts again, attempting to school her features into detached awareness, picturing the face she used to see in the mirror. Red lips, a slightly raised eyebrow, every hair carefully tamed into place. The one good thing about losing her sight is that, in her mind’s eye, she’ll never age past 34. When he pulls his hand away from her, her body moves without thinking to follow, and it’s only a snort from the chair beside her that forces her to collect her thoughts and rein herself in.

“Now,” says Dr. Locksley, as the lights dim in the exam room, “Shall we get started?”

***

Emma guides her to the doctor’s office, but before she can take a seat next to Regina, she’s waved away. Partly out of stubborn pride, and partly out of…out of something Regina doesn’t want to give name to. “Wait in the reception area,” Regina says. She doesn’t need to see her friend to know the look on her face, know that she wants to argue, but Regina stops her cold. “Please,” she says, and the please is enough for Emma to back down.

“I’ll be waiting,” Emma says.

Alone in Dr. Locksley’s office, Regina takes stock. She knows that the news he’s going to deliver isn’t good, has known it since he made that first  _hmmm_  of disappointment as he examined her. She steels herself, breathes deep. Catches the delicate scent of pine and smoke. A candle perhaps? No, not strong enough for that. Most likely the lingering scent of soap. The chair in his office is heavy, substantial, and her fingers chase lightly over carved wood. He’s a man who likes quality. Her own office is decorated in walnut and brocade – in that, it appears, they are well matched.

He calls back over his shoulder to the receptionist as he enters the room, and she once again catches woodsmoke and forest in the air. Definitely soap, then. He eases himself into his desk chair, a dark shape haloed by the winter sun streaming through the windows.

“So, Ms. Mills,” he says, and she corrects him before he can continue.

“Regina.”

“Regina,” he says, and her heart beats a bit faster at the sound of her name coming from his lips. “I see that Dr. Whale has been doing injections, and that they’ve helped alleviate the fluid in your eyes. That’s good, but…”

“Not good enough,” she finishes for him.

“Not good enough,” he agrees. “I wish I had some better news for you, but the truth is, macular dystrophy is incurable.”

She knows this. She’s known it since Whale told her why she could no longer make out faces two feet in front of her. Still, she fights to hold back tears – her eyes once again betray her as the wetness slides down her cheek.

“I’m sorry,” he says softly. “I wish I could do more.”

She shakes her head and forces a smile. “You’ve done plenty,” she says, fighting to keep her voice from breaking. “You fit me in when your schedule is impossible. That’s all I can ask.” She leans forward and reaches out for a handshake, wanting nothing more than to be out of this room. When her right hand makes contact, it’s not with the doctor, but with something cool – metal, obviously – and it hits his desk with a sharp thud.

“I’m sorry-“ she says, but he cuts her off.

“No need. Just a photo of my son, no harm done.”

He has a son. Of course he has a son. He probably has an adoring wife along with it. “How old?” she asks, out of politeness more than curiosity.

“Four,” he replies, and there it is again – that smile that lifts the edges of his voice. “He lives with his mother, so I don’t get to see him as often as I’d like.”

“But you do get to see him.” The moment the words escape her mouth, she regrets them. She can’t stand pity, and here she is practically begging for it. Regina Mills, who never backed down from a challenge in her life, is felled by a photo of a child.

“I do,” he says. No pity in his voice. Regret, perhaps, and empathy, but no pity. “I get to see him, and I thank God every day for it. And I wish I could give that to you.” He laughs. “Well, maybe not seeing my son as he’s a bit of a terror, but seeing your own children, your family.” He pauses for a second. “Is Emma your…”

She laughs before he can finish the sentence. “My wife? Good God, no. She’s the thorn in my side that won’t ever go away. Her son is my godson. He’s eleven.” She pauses. “I guess he always will be eleven to me.”

Dr. Locksley laughs, and his chuckle is warm and inviting. The kind of laugh best heard over a candlelight dinner, or deep in the night, when he should be sleeping but is more interested in staying awake.  _Down, girl_ , she thinks to herself. He’s her doctor. More or less. She won’t be seeing him again now that she knows he can’t help her, but still. Barriers must be maintained. Professional distance must be respected.

“In that case,” Dr. Locksley jokes, “I hope he’s a sight better-looking than I was when I was eleven. Nothing but buck teeth and skinny legs.”

She laughs at that, trying and failing to reconcile the image she’s created of him in her mind with the reality of a pre-teen boy. “I hope you grew out of it,” she says.

“I did. Now I look like Brad Pitt, but better.”

Oh, she likes him. None of the other doctors have been like this – witty, but gentle. Understanding without pitying. Trying to win a smile from her, rather than patting her hand and reassuring her that what she’s lost isn’t so very bad, not in the long run. She likes him, and she wishes he could help her – not only because she so desperately wants to see again, but because she wants to see  _him_.  To know if that voice, if that air of pine, if that warmth from his hand on her knee is real. If he’s who she imagines him to be.

Maybe it’s best this way. Maybe it’s best that she walks out of here, her head held high, taking comfort in his teasing rather than licking her wounds in his diagnosis. She’s grateful, and that’s not a sentiment she’s ever expressed for any of the doctors who have preceded him.

She should get out now, while she’s still buoyed by the attention of a man she imagines to be perfect, before she remembers that he’s being kind to her because she has good insurance. She pushes herself out of her chair and extends a hand again, praying that she won’t knock over anything else. He grasps it firmly, a hand callused by hard work done years before medical school. Holds on a moment too long.

Not long enough.

“I’ll walk you out,” he says, and cups her elbow as he guides her to the reception area. Emma helps Regina sign her paperwork and hands her her purse and coat. They’re on the way out the door when he calls to her.

“Regina,” he says, “I’ll call you in a day or two to check on you.”

I’ll call you. Not my office will call you, but  _I’ll call you_. It means nothing, she’s sure, but for a second, she allows herself a little flight of fancy, before Emma’s tugging on her sleeve ruins her reverie.

“Thank you, Dr. Locksley,” she says over her shoulder.

“Robin,” he says, just before the door closes behind her.  _Robin_. In the silence of the hallway, that one word echoes, over and over again. Robin.


	2. Chapter 2

She counts steps. Fifteen steps from the doorway to her desk. One hundred and twenty-three  steps from the main entrance to her office. Sixty-seven steps from the curb to the door. It’s precaution at this point, a little bit of planning ahead for what’s to come. She can still make out shapes, and colors too if the light is bright enough, but at some point, she’s not going to be able to see where she’s going. So Regina counts. Seventy-seven steps down the hallway to the bathroom. Another forty to the kitchen for coffee. She runs her hand along the walls as she walks, making note of every crack in the plaster (a chunk missing from the wall at step thirteen, twenty-seven to go before she can get herself a mug of decaf).

The people in her office have always been respectful, whether they wanted to be or not. She demanded it from the day she first set foot in the Watertown city building as a newly-elected member of the town council. Now, six years later, she’s the town manager, and the respect she’d earned through years of hard work and stubborn refusal to back down have given way to a new deference, one granted by the sight of her shuffling through the hallways, and trying, but not always succeeding, to avoid obstacles in her path.

Pity, again. The admins duck past her, but the town council members and committee members reach out, trying to guide her to her destination, and she has to fight to keep from biting off their heads as she shakes off their hands and assures them that she’s fine, that she can handle it, that she appreciates their concern but it’s not necessary.

If she weren’t so damn obstinate, she would have resigned her post a year ago when she realized that she could no longer read the budget on her 40-inch computer monitor. But she can’t give up, not yet. Giving up would be admitting defeat. Admitting weakness, and Regina Mills is not weak.

“Your mother’s child,” her stepsister had said, and at that point Regina could still make out the raised eyebrow and pursed lips that indicated that Mary Margaret was most definitely  _not_  paying her a compliment.

Still, she is her mother’s child, for better or worse, so she counts the steps from the kitchen back to her office, mug cradled gently in one hand as the other guides her, seam by seam on cheap wallpaper, along the hallway. Seven panels until the knob is in her hand.

 _Speak of the devil, and she shall appear_. Gardenia bodywash and shuffling papers – it’s not hard to figure out who is perched in her chair, digging through the day’s work.

“Don’t you have a class to teach?” Regina snaps. Her stepsister laughs.

“It’s the first week in January. I’m off until next week.” Regina should know that, of course. She has the school calendars, both public and private, tacked to the wall next to her desk. “Besides,” Mary Margaret continues, “I’m here to help.”

“You’re sitting in my chair, messing with my things,” Regina bites back. “Please explain to me how that’s helpful.”

Mary Margaret stands and walks over to Regina, taking her arm and guiding her back to her desk. It’s all Regina can do to keep from slapping her, but Mary Margaret is family. Family she never asked for, but family nonetheless, and grudgingly, Regina admits to herself that her surprise visits have at times been helpful. Mary Margaret is the reason that she has a computer monitor that she can still see, more or less, and Mary Margaret is the one who rearranged her filing cabinets with an almost incomprehensible system of punched holes and raised tabs so that Regina knows which drawer corresponds to which department. Still, Regina bristles at the thought that she needs help from the girl who couldn’t even get a brush through her hair as a child without throwing a temper tantrum.

She can hear a few clicks of the mouse, can make out the outlines of an Excel spreadsheet, and then a disembodied voice is leading her through the city budget.

“See,” Mary Margaret says, a bit of smug pride in her voice that Regina knows she didn’t inherit from her insipid father, “Now you know the budget.”

The cells shift as the electronic voice reads out numbers. She can make out colors changing, and with the voice software, she can follow along. Maybe not enough to keep up at her usual pace, but enough to stave off retirement for just a bit longer.

“That voice sounds like my mother. You couldn’t find a better one?” One with warmth and charm, and perhaps an English accent.

Mary Margaret pats her shoulder. “You still can’t say thank you, can you?” She pushes something toward Regina. “Kale salad. Enjoy. I’ll call you later.”

 _I’ll call you later_. It rings through Regina’s  mind, long after her stepsister has left. A promise. Mary Margaret will deliver, of that she’s sure.  Emma will call her tonight to check on her. The phone will ring, and ring and ring, and none of the calls will be the one she wants to receive.

 _You’re a silly girl,_  she thinks. She shakes herself out of her reverie and turns her attention back to the monitor, where the clipped electronic voice is detailing the money left in the budget for snow removal. She hides the budget with the click of a mouse – she doesn’t need to see to know where the  _show desktop_  icon is. Another click, in the general area of her toolbar, and Chrome fires up. Before she can stop herself, she googles Robin Locksley. Years of surfing the internet haven’t left her, she knows exactly where to draw the mouse to select View Images. A couple of clicks on the keyboard, and there he is.

She magnifies the first image until it fills her screen. She can’t trust staring head on, so she turns just a little to the left to let her peripheral vision, unaffected by the blisters under her retinas, do the work. How about that, he does have a beard. And straight white teeth, just as she’d imagined. He has soft creases at his eyes. Even with the photo blown up to full-screen, she can’t make out the color, but she knows they’re blue.  She lets her imagination fill in the rest, for just a second, then she clicks to make the window disappear.

“Ashley,” she calls, and in the space of a heartbeat, her assistant is there to call up the budget again. Regina gets back to work.

***

Eighteen stairs, then twelve steps to her bedroom. She counts them, sotto voce, words whispering in time with footfalls. Six steps between the dresser that holds her satin pajamas and the bed. iPad in hand a second later, and then an audiobook to lull her to sleep. She’s curled up on her side, lost in the adventures of the Bennet sisters, when her phone rings. “Regina Mills,” she barks, knowing that anyone that calls her after 8pm is most likely looking for help to a problem. She may be tucked in bed, she may be in her jammies, but she’ll be damned if she sounds tired when she answers the phone.

“Regina, it’s Dr. Locksley. “  A pause. “Robin.”

78 beats per minute, that’s her heart rate. 74 now that he’s said his name and her heart skips. She takes a deep breath and resumes counting.

“I trust I’m not disturbing you? I know it’s late to call.”

It  _is_  late to call. Calls at this hour are reserved for Emma, bitching about Henry’s math homework, or Mary Margaret asking why David hasn’t proposed, or… or for Daniel, whispering his fantasies into her ear. Daniel, who hasn’t called since the car accident fourteen years ago. Doctors don’t call at this hour.

Eighteen breaths per minute. In, out.

“I just wanted to check on you,” he says, and she’s not sure how to respond. “I know it’s a bit rough, getting that kind of news.”

“I’m fine,” she says, and she surprises herself with her own calm demeanor. “I expected it.”

“Still…” he says, but doesn’t continue. An entire life is born, grows, lives and dies in his pause. “Still, I just wanted to see  you-“

She cuts him off. “Dr. Locksley-“

“Robin,” he corrects her.

“Robin, I’m fine. You did the best you could, so there’s no need for me to come back in. I’ll deal with it.”

Silence, again. Six breaths before she realizes his lungs are keeping time with hers.

“I wasn’t going to ask to see you again here,” he finally replies. “I was just going to ask to see you again.”

Eighteen breaths per minute, and not a single one of them is doing her a damn bit of good.

Finally, she answers. “I’d like that.”


	3. Chapter 3

She can’t remember the last time she was on a date, Regina tells Mary Margaret.

It’s a lie, and a lie that catches up with her as Emma snorts from the general direction of the bed. Of course she remembers the last time she was on a date. She went for dinner and a movie with a cop, one of Watertown’s finest, one that had given her a stern lecture about the failing blinkers on her classic Mercedes in the middle of rush hour traffic  and then passed along his phone number. A cop who talked incessantly of his K-9 partner during dinner, sniffled and cleared his throat incessantly through Guardians of the Galaxy, and kissed her at the end of the night with enough slobber that she’d wished she’d spent the evening with his German Shepherd instead. At least the dog would have had the sense to sit and stay and not try to cop a feel.

Fortunately, Mary Margaret’s enthusiasm is enough to cut off any wayward commentary from Emma. “How about this?” Mary Margaret asks as she waggles a dress toward Regina. With the excessively bright light in her bedroom, Regina can make out that it’s black, but it’s not until she runs her hands along it that she can identify it. Alexander Wang, stretch jersey with strategically placed zippers, more midnight blue than black (the light is bright, but never quite bright enough).

“I can’t wear that,” she says flatly. “That’s a third-date dress, not a first-date dress.”

A shift on the bed, and Emma is on her feet. Oh, well hell. “First of all,” Emma starts, and Regina doesn’t need to see to know that Emma is ticking off her points on her nail-bitten fingers. “First of all, if you wear one of your boring-ass pantsuits, you won’t get a second date, much less a third. Secondly, how would you know what a third date dress would be?”

 _Ouch_. “Point taken,” Regina concedes icily.

“I’m just saying,” Emma continues. “The doc was hot. He’s worth going back for more. And if you want to make sure the feeling is mutual, this is the dress.”

The fabric moves again out of the corner of her eye, and Regina is taken back for a moment to a thirteen-year-old Mary Margaret, grinning through a mouthful of braces as Regina waits for Daniel to pick her up for the homecoming dance.

The braces may be long gone, but Regina has no doubt that Mary Margaret still has that ridiculous puppydog grin on her face. She takes the hanger with one hand and waves her companions out with the other. “Go. Out. I can still handle getting dressed by myself.” As she pushes the door closed, she hears Emma’s cackling from the hallway – “bet she wears the boring underwear.”

“You said the doctor was hot,” Mary Margaret shoots back. “No bet.”

Regina digs into her underwear drawer until her fingers can trace a matching set of lace and embroidery, grateful to Mary Margaret for taking the initiative to pin matching sets together. Purple satin, she remembers. Breasts pushed up and color contrasting against her olive skin. She hasn’t worn this set for years; it’s been shoved back to the netherworld of her dresser drawer and smells faintly of oak and woodstain, but today is a good day to dig it out. Purple satin.  _No bet._

He arrives right on time, with a small bouquet. “Red and white roses, how beautiful,” Mary Margaret says. Regina can’t quite make out the colors, but the heady perfume of the roses brings a smile to her face.  A bouquet of roses, and she’s right back to teenage Regina, waiting for Daniel to pick her up for the prom.

Mary Margaret thrusts the bouquet into her hands. “They’re beautiful,” she says automatically. It’s a rote answer; how the hell does she know if they’re beautiful?

“They might be wilting,” he jokes, “but I couldn’t resist the perfume. They smell like my mother’s garden in London.”

She inhales deeply and imagines a garden tucked into a stone house. She’s never been to London, so the picture in her mind is built from television shows and books, but it’s enough to conjure a tow-headed boy playing soccer (football, she reminds herself) among his mother’s prized plants. “They’re perfect,” she says, unwilling to let go of the mental picture of that small, smiling boy.

She expects a candlelit, romantic dinner, something straight out of Lady and the Tramp with red checkered tablecloths and candles perched precariously in a long-empty bottle of third-rate Chianti.  Instead, he’s taken her to a slightly divey Cajun restaurant in Cambridge, full of eager law students and reeking of red peppers and garlic. He guides her past pressed-wood tables filled with raucous Millenials shouting about sucking heads (Regina laughs at that. She’s not a robot, and that was funny, even if she’d never admit to it out loud), until the hostess gestures to a table tucked into the quiet corner that faces what she can smell is most definitely the bathroom.

 _Very romantic_ , she thinks. And still, the restaurant has charm, and the Puerto Rican in her can’t turn away from the garlic wafting through the air. Not the first choice for a date, but at least the beer menu is comprehensive, and she stands a better-than-good chance of getting some decent hush puppies this evening.

Regina was a good, red-blooded, American college girl, educated at the University of Virginia, so it’s no surprise that she spent a spring break in the Big Easy. She knows her jambalaya from her gumbo, knows beignets are fluffy clouds of dough and sugar sent from heaven and knows that chicory is an acquired taste. But how does Robin, a Brit though and through, know about cochon de lait and Abita beer?

She doesn’t even have a chance to ask him before he pipes up. “My mother,” he says. “Born and raised in Baton Rouge, but did a semester abroad at East Anglia, and met my father.” He grimaced a bit before continuing. “It was all downhill from there.”

They talk over his parents’ divorce, over his decision to leave the UK and relocate to Louisiana as they peruse the menu (Regina trying to unobtrusively pull her magnifying glass from her purse, then giving up completely. After all, he knows her diagnosis; it’s not like he’s going to be shocked that she can’t read the menu. ) Her brow knits as she struggles to make out the choices, but he never stops talking. Never takes the menu out of her hands and asks if she needs help, and by the time she’s selected her entrée (gumbo, of course, extra hot), he’s covered his life history up to his graduation from Tulane. She hands over the menu to the eager waiter, not much older than she was the first time she sampled barbecued shrimp, and takes a quick, private sigh of relief that she’s with a man who doesn’t see her as an invalid. He understands her limitations; no need for the long explanation that yes, she can still see some things, but that won’t last. No pitying looks, no empathetic sighs, just a man with a British accent who’s rambled on for a bit about the French Quarter and an asshole father.

There’s a pause in the conversation, and she realizes that he must have asked her a question.  “I’m sorry?” she says, feeling a little guilty that she’s been stuck in her own head for the last few minutes.

“Your family,” he asks. “Now that I’ve bored you with mine, it’s time to return the favor.”

She doesn’t need a mirror to know that a warm flush has reddened her cheeks. Here’s a man who’s been nothing but charming, and she’s basically tuned him out to retreat into her own head and second-guess her every thoughts.

“My family,” she says with a smile. “My family is here in Boston. My dad and I are very close, but my mother and I…”

She trails off at that. How does she explain her relationship with her mother? Cora Mills wanted her only daughter to be something better, something more, something to brag about in the country club, and yet her only daughter is struggling to hold onto her small-town civic service job. Her mother always wanted Regina to marry a doctor, or a lawyer, or a politician, but something tells her that Robin Locksley wouldn’t quite fit the bill. Too provincial. Not quite ambitious enough. A cardiac surgeon or a medical researcher on the forefront of a cancer cure, sure, but an opthamologist? Even if he is the best in his field, it’s still small potatoes.

“My mother and I don’t get along,” she finishes lamely. “Too much alike, I guess. Or not alike enough.”

It’s a vague enough answer, and one that hopefully will put an end to the conversation. She feels handicapped enough without delving into her damaging relationship with her mother. Aren’t they supposed to be discussing likes and dislikes on a first date? Childhood pets, what they wanted to be when they grew up?

Of course, they ARE grown up now. Talking to him about ten-year-old Regina’s dream of being a horse trainer would seem a bit silly. Besides, once one’s date has delivered a devastating medical diagnosis, it seems a bit silly to feel self-conscious about chatting about mucking out a stall over dessert.

Robin hasn’t said anything while she’s been lost in her own thoughts yet again, and she immediately castigates herself for being poor company. Not being able to see is one thing; not being able to talk is another. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I’m being a lousy date.”

“Not at all,” he disagrees. “You’re a delightful date. You just seemed like you had more to say on the matter.”

First date conversation it is not, but she’s powerless to resist his gentle prod. Before she can stop herself, Regina has outlined for this poor soul her entire troubled history with her mother, right down to Cora’s yanking her tuition to BU to keep her from getting engaged to Daniel. She kicks herself mentally, but the words won’t stop themselves from escaping, tripping over her tongue in a series of truly embarrassing stops and starts. Through it all, he offers little more than a hum of encouragement or a shake of his head.

“I’m pathetic, aren’t I,” she concludes with what she hopes is a rueful grin.

“Not pathetic,” he says. “Human.” He reaches across the table to take her hand in his, and she feels it again – that hum of electricity shooting up her spine. Even if she’s blown the date, she still has this. At least until dessert is cleared away.

Robin keeps up a steady stream of conversation over dessert, about vacation spots and tales of raising his son, and she’s able to convince herself over forkfuls of bread pudding that she’s not a terrible date. Over echoes of her mother’s voice that she’s not quite good enough, she manages to make the appropriate answers, and she’s rewarded with a few of those chuckles that send shivers down her spine. He pays the check with the barest minimum of tolerating an argument from her, and before Regina knows it, he’s leading her out the door and back to his car.

Well, that’s it. Barely a dinner and he can’t wait to get rid of her. If she weren’t wearing such expensive heels, she’d kick herself. She settles back into the leather of the passenger seat, berating herself for bringing up all the worst topics for a first date. She might as well have worn a wedding dress and asked him for the names of their future children. Regina doesn’t even realize that she’s gone quiet again until he clears his throat.

“I hate to end the evening,” he says, “but it’s well after midnight, and I don’t wish to keep you up all night.”

Even from miles away, she can hear Emma cackling. “After midnight?” It can’t be, but then, she can hardly check her watch to confirm. “It can’t be later than nine o’clock.”

He rests his hand on her knee, and this time it’s not the considerate gesture of a doctor to a patient with failing eyesight; his restless fingers tell her that it’s not necessarily her knee he wants to be touching. “Time flies,” he laughs, “but I don’t think your entourage at home would thank me for making them wait up for you.

He’s completely wrong there, but again – not first date conversation. “I suppose not,” she says, but this time the silence she lapses into is comfortable. She doesn’t have to perform – she’s done enough of that over the course of the evening. She hums along to the music playing on the car radio without thinking, and he taps his finger on her knee to keep the beat. It anchors her, the quick staccato of his fingertip against her skin. Anchors her and keeps her in the moment. _I’m having fun_ , she admits to herself. _I’m having fun, and I don’t want it to end_.

The car comes to a stop, and she realizes that, like it or not, it is going to come to an end. The driver’s door slams shut, and before she can unbuckle her seatbelt, he’s at the passenger door with a hand on her elbow to help her out of the car. He guides her up the walk, and in the glow of the porch light, she can pretend to see his face. “I had a good time,” she admits, and she ducks her head like a shy teenager.

“I did too,” he answers. He tips up her chin with the lightest of touches, and before she can second-guess the moment, he kisses her with a feather-light touch. “I hope to do it again soon.”

“Me too,” she whispers. This time, when his lips meet hers, she’s ready. She revels in the pressure of his lips against hers, his breath coming fast against her cheek, and the faintest taste of beer and syrup on his tongue. He breaks the kiss just a moment too soon, but not soon enough for her – what did he call it? – her entourage to spoil the farewell. The lights click on, and though Regina can’t see the figures silhouetted against the windows, she knows all too well that Emma and Mary Margaret are keeping close watch on the porch.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he says, and kisses her once again. She whispers goodnight, and then she’s left with the soft tapping of retreating footsteps. She brings a hand up to her lips and traces, again and again, the feel of his kiss. She would have likely stayed on the porch all night, reliving those last few moments, if Emma hadn’t thrown open the door and dragged her inside.

He doesn’t wait until tomorrow to call her. He doesn’t wait the traditional two days to call her, and she doesn’t wait to tell him that she’d love to see him again.


	4. Chapter 4

Ironic, that as she’s losing her vision, a bright spot appears in her life.

His name is Robin, and just whispering his name under her breath as she brushes her teeth makes her smile. Makes her grin like a giddy teenage girl, a smile so wide that she manages to dribble toothpaste on her freshly pressed shirt. She has a meeting in an hour and no time to worry about her wardrobe, so she yanks the blouse over her head and swaps it out for one that she hopes matches the pantsuit she’s already committed to wearing. If not, she can’t quite convince herself to care. After all, what’s the point of being legally blind if you can’t get some sympathy for unfortunate wardrobe choices?

Her phone buzzes, and Siri tells her that her driver is downstairs waiting for her. She should grab her shoes and head out the door, and she will…but before she does, she pulls up her texts. “Siri, read text from Robin Locksley,” she says, and her phone obediently obliges.

_“I had a great time the other night. Looking forward to this weekend.”_

It sounds awkward in Siri’s mechanical voice, but she replays it in her head with Robin’s British accent. Over and over. He’s not the only one looking forward to the weekend.

***

She makes it through the first round of meetings with a minimum of argument. Budgeting, allocations, negotiating a new contract for IT services. Halfway through Tuesday, and four hours closer to the weekend. Regina lives for her work, has lived for it since she was first elected to city council, but today, work is a necessary evil. She knows she’s been unfocused, glassy-eyed, several minutes behind the thread of conversation in each of her meetings. For once, she’s grateful for her diagnosis; it’s making her look more like a woman with a medical issue and less like a woman who is daydreaming about a blue-eyed Brit with a bit of scruff and a taste for Southern food.  _Get it together, Regina_ , she scolds herself.  _You’re an adult. Act like it_.

Her one o’clock appointment is waiting in her office when she gets back from lunch. Even if he weren’t always absurdly punctual (a trait he certainly didn’t get from his mother), she’d know Henry’s presence from the tapping of letters on his iPhone, from the muttering under his breath as he talks through what he’s texting, and from the scent of the soap that he prefers over Emma’s floral bodywash. At 11, he’s still too small to be a head over the high-backed chairs facing her desk, but when the door closes behind her, she can see a blur pop up as he gets to his feet. Ever the little gentleman, he’s at her side in a second, leading her to her desk and helping her settle into her chair.

She doesn’t have the heart to tell him that she doesn’t need help, not yet anyway. She squeezes the hand that cups her elbow and thanks him, as always, for being her knight in shining armor.

Once he’s settled back in his chair across from her, he starts shuffling paper and pencils. “Are you ready for this, Regina?”

She nods, trying to hide her smile at his businesslike attitude and struggling to call up an equally professional face. Hard to do with the boy who used to throw up on her shirts when he was a baby, but for his sake, she’s trying. “I’m ready. Fire away.”

He has a list of questions prepared for her. His gifted program is doing a unit on civil rights, and Henry chose to do his assignment on the Americans with Disabilities Act. He’d asked her about it cautiously at first, couching his essay in terms of the government’s responsibility to provide adequate facilities. He probably would have been content with leaving it at that, even though she knew that’s not what he wanted, until she volunteered to talk to him about personal experience.

She didn’t need to be able to see his face to know that it lit up with excitement. Henry didn’t want to write a report on bathroom specifications under the ADA; he wanted to tell the story of a person living with a disability. And, because she loved him, she’d volunteered her own story.

His questions are simple, clinical at first. What were her symptoms? How was she diagnosed? He already knows the answers, having lived through it with her, but she tries to be clear and detailed in her answers. After all, she wants him to do well on his assignment. The better he does on his assignment, the better the Watertown schools look, and the more funding they can secure from the state.

 _Liar_ , she tells herself.  _You just want him to do well so that he can be proud of himself_. She answers him in as much detail as she can, talking about the blurred vision that never seemed to go away, no matter how much sleep she got or how many different brands of eyedrops she used. She tells him about the floating blindspots that appeared one day and never went away, says that it was the day that she couldn’t manage to pick up a pen that she knew she’d left on her desk that finally drove her to go to a doctor. She explains the difference between macular degeneration – something that happens with age – and macular dystrophy – something that happens with bad luck.

He asks her about coping mechanisms, and she explains Mary Margaret’s filing systems and programs on her computer, and she shows him how she counts steps. He asks her about resources, and she tells him about the meeting she had with someone from Industries for the Blind. She doesn’t tell him about how she cried for two hours after the meeting, curled up in a ball on her couch. She doesn’t tell him that the talk of Braille, and canes, and maybe a dog made her want to give up completely and lock herself in her house. Instead, she reminds him that she continues to work, and will do so with all the resources she can muster. She wants him to be proud of himself, but selfishly, she wants him to be proud of her too.

“What was the hardest part of your diagnosis?”

That one catches her off guard. In some ways, her diagnosis was a relief. At least she had a name to what was happening to her. She could come up with a game plan, a strategy, put a name to the enemy she was fighting. In other ways, it was beyond devastating. For a woman who prided herself on being independent, the idea that she was going to lose the ability to read, to drive, to recognize the people she loved was simply unthinkable.

“I miss my car,” she says. It sounds flip, even to her jaded ears. “I love my car, Henry. I bought it used after I graduated from college. I washed it every week, conditioned the leather every month, took it in for every service appointment.” She laughs a little. “In a lot of ways, it’s the steadiest long-term relationship I’ve ever had. And now it’s sitting in my driveway, gathering dust. I should sell it, but I can’t bring myself to do it.”

He doesn’t answer. She doesn’t need to see him to know that he’s shifting in his seat; she can hear the leather creaking as his body weight moves. She should probably stop talking. He’s young to understand all of this, and he’s far too young to be playing the role of her shrink. Still, it feels good to let it out, so she keeps going. “I miss cooking. I can’t read recipes anymore, so anything I know how to cook, I can still do…more or less…but I won’t ever learn how to make classic French cuisine.”

“Ew,” Henry says, and she can’t stop a chuckle. Anything that’s not burgers or pizza is lost on him.

“I miss seeing people smile,” she continues. “I can see your faces so clearly in my mind when you talk, but it’s not the same. Your mother, Mary Margaret, you…” she pauses for a second to rein in her emotions. “I can picture your face, but I know it’s changing, and I won’t see what you look like when you’re a teenager, or an adult. That’s…hard.”

She hears his whispered  _I’m sorry_ , but waves her hand. “No, no, I know. It’s a tough thing to think about. And I don’t want you to feel bad for me because of this, because I can still hear your voice. That’s a good thing, Henry. That’s a good enough thing for me.”

Silence weighs heavily between them, broken only by the scratching of his pencil against paper and the ticking of the clock on her mantel. She kicks herself for throwing all of this on a boy, a sweet boy who’s never been anything but a joy to her. It’s a good thing she never had children herself; clearly, even now, she still doesn’t know how to talk to them.

Henry’s pencil stills, and she braces herself for the next question. “What keeps you going?” he asks. “How do you find hope in all this?

 _Sweet boy_. If there’s one thing Henry believes in, it’s hope. “Well, Henry, a lot of things keep me going. I’m still me. I still have a job to do. I still have four other senses that work just fine. I still have family, and friends, and you,” she pauses at that and smiles at him, “and I still have things I want to accomplish in my life. I’m only 34, and I know that sounds old to you-“ (she ignores the snort coming from across the desk) –“but I still have a lot of life left in me. There are still new things that I want to experience.”

A bright spot in the darkness, a man’s voice over the phone, a kiss that tastes of Cajun food and beer. So many new things she wants to experience with him. So many things to hear, and feel, and touch.

“Sometimes you find hope where you least expect it, and where you most need it.”

***

One more day checked off – three days until the weekend. She curls into her bed, pulling the covers up to her chest before she reaches for the phone. “Hey Siri.”

At the telltale beep, she asks Siri to call Robin Locksley. Maybe it’s early in their…whatever it is…to be calling him at bedtime, but she’s exhausted from her day, and hurting from baring her soul to Henry, and she just wants to hear his voice.

“Miss Mills,” he answers, and she can hear the smile in his voice. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I just…I just wanted to say hi,” she says. It sounds silly, even to her.

“Well, then, hello. How was your day?”

“Mmmm, not that great.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks, and she doesn’t have to be blind to hear his concern. For a second, her defenses go up, until she reminds herself that she called  _him_.

“ I’d rather hear about yours. In detail.”

“I aim to please,” he says, and she snuggles a bit more into her pillow as he starts to talk. Words, flowing freely. Words she’s heard before, but never in his voice, never with that accent. Words that set to work unknotting the stress in her shoulders and lulling her into the space between awake and asleep.

A bright spot in the dark of the night.


	5. Chapter 5

When she was six years old, she’d been so eager to get her new doll out of the box on Christmas morning that she’d managed to rip its head right off along with the zip tie holding it to the packaging. She’d screamed at the sight of the plastic head bouncing across her mother’s polished hardwood floor, then collapsed into tears in front of the tree.

Cora had pursed her lips and shook her head, and her mother’s obvious disappointment in yet another of Regina’s improper reactions only made her cry harder. Her father retrieved the head, the plastic body and his wailing daughter, and tucked all three into his lap. “We’ll fix it,” he said. “Between you and me, we can fix anything.” It had taken him a screwdriver, an Irish coffee and the better part of an hour, but by the time the turkey was cooling on the counter, Regina’s doll had come back to life and Christmas had been saved.

“See, princess?” he’d said. “Every problem has a solution, if you just look for it.”

The problem is, her father isn’t here to look for solutions, and she can’t see them even if they’re staring her right in the face.

The day had started off poorly and gone downhill from there. She’d tripped over an umbrella that Emma had left propped up against the doorframe in the main hallway, spilling coffee down the front of her suit and on her grandmother’s Persian rug. Then, once she’d made it to the office, she discovered that IT had upgraded her computer, effectively wiping out all of the settings that she’d worked so hard to memorize. As much as she hated to admit she needed help, she’d called Mary Margaret to come over to give her a hand.  _Of course,_ she’d said _, but I can’t come by until the weekend. We’re in the middle of standardized testing, and I have to proctor three different exams every day this week_.

***

For the first time since she’s set foot in this building, Regina hates every single thing about government policy. The next time the Watertown school board needs her help, she’s going to tell them in detail how exactly they can shove their heads directly up their own asses.

She’ll even draw them a diagram, if only she can find her goddamn pen. Her hands scrabble around her desktop looking for the treasured Mont Blanc her father had given her as a college graduation gift, connecting with it just long enough to send it soaring off the desk and rolling across the floor.

Thirty-four years old, and she wants to throw herself down on the floor and scream and kick her very expensive heels into the floor until she cracks the wood and her daddy comes and rescues her. Instead, she drops to her hands and knees and begins searching for her lost pen, muttering curses under her breath that would make even Emma blush. She’s well into her tirade when she hears her office door open, and as she tries to pop herself up to her knees to discover who’s invaded her sanctuary, she cracks her head on the corner of her desk.

“Motherfucker!” she spits.

“Regina, dear, that language is hardly appropriate for a woman of your education and position.”

 _Mother_. Of course. Just when you think you’ve hit rock bottom, Cora Mills comes along to tie a cinder block around your ankle. She’s completely forgotten that she’d freed up her schedule to have lunch with her mother today, a small concession to the woman who can only bear slumming it to the suburbs once a year.

“Regina, get up. You’re going to get dust on your pants,” her mother says, and her tone is enough to make Regina wonder which is worse, the dust or the pants. She crawls back an undignified few feet and pushes herself up, brushing her hair back behind her ears and smoothing the wrinkles she no doubt had from her little adventure on the floor. Too little, too late – Cora tugs at the lapels of her jacket, remarks that her hair looks so much better clipped back off her face, and asks her if she’s ready to go.

 _Not now, not ever_ , Regina thinks, but she dutifully follows the sound of Cora’s footsteps echoing down the hallway.

***

By the time she gets home, she’s exhausted, frustrated and angry. She wants nothing more than to curl up in her pajamas and robe with a cup of tea, listen to some classical music in the dark and pretend that the world doesn’t exist outside of her bedroom. She’s halfway through the first act of Swan Lake when the phone buzzes.

 _Robin Locksley_ , Siri announces, and instantly, Regina’s mood lifts. If ever there were a balm for a weary soul, it would be his voice. She answers, and his “Hello, Miss Mills,” brings a smile to her face.

“Hi yourself,” she answers. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Just wanted to hear the sound of your voice,” he replies, echoing their conversation from a few days ago. “Also wanted to firm up plans for tomorrow, if that’s all right?”

It’s more than all right. She’s been looking forward to seeing him again all week, and after the day she’s had, she can think of nothing she wants more than to spend an evening in his company. “That sounds perfect,” she says with a sigh. “What were you thinking?”

“Well,” he says, “it’s supposed to be a bright and sunny day tomorrow, and not too cold. So what do you say to brunch, then a walk?”

She should say yes, she  _means_  to say yes, but the petulant six-year-old in her slips out before she can stop it. “Sounds like a great outing for someone who can’t see in the dark.”

 _Jesus, Regina_ , she chides herself. The first man who’s kissed her in years, and she’s throwing a temper tantrum because he’s being considerate of her needs. No wonder she doesn’t date. She hears his intake of breath, but cuts him off before he can respond to her bitchy reply.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “You didn’t deserve that. Brunch and a walk sounds lovely.”

He doesn’t speak for a long moment, long enough for her to count her breaths and wish that she could just hang up the phone and pretend that they’d never had this conversation.

“Maybe I did,” he finally says, a little bit ruefully. “I can’t say that I wouldn’t have come up with this plan if I didn’t remember that you were a woman who couldn’t see in the dark. It’s an occupational hazard, but I certainly didn’t mean to insult you.”

She has to give him points for honesty. And, if she’s being honest with herself, she owes it to him to cut him some slack for actually thinking about what would be best for  _her_ , rather than what would be best for him. “I know you didn’t,” she sighs. “Brunch sounds lovely.”

“Liar,” he chuckles. “Brunch sounds like a pity date, not a date with a man who can’t stop thinking about you. Tell me, what would  _you_  like to do?”

She’d like to go out for a candlelit dinner and a night at the opera, or a dark and dingy jazz club, or even tacos from a food truck following a late-night revival of  _Sunset Boulevard_. She’d like to cook dinner for him, then invite him to sit next to her on the couch, share a bottle of red wine…maybe something a little stronger, a little liquid courage…and wind up necking like teenagers halfway through her first glass. She’d like to do a lot of things that she’s not quite ready to say out loud. Still, there’s one thing that she wants to do with him that she knows she’ll enjoy. “I’d like to take you to my favorite places, and see them from your eyes.”

“In that case, I am completely at your command. Just tell me when and where.”

“Pick me up at seven?” she says, a little bit hesitantly.

“At five,” he says. “For a man who can’t stop thinking about you, seven is much too late.”

“Five it is,” she agrees, wheels turning in her head. Cocktails at Bardo, dinner at Megara’s Greek Taverna, and maybe that  _Sunset Boulevard_  revival after all. She’ll invite him in for a nightcap and open the bottle of 25-year Scotch her father gave her for her last birthday. Maybe she will kiss him like a reckless teenager; maybe she won’t.

But the possibility…the possibility is enough to let her drift off to sleep with a smile on her face.


	6. Chapter 6

He’s supposed to pick her up in a few minutes, and Regina can’t find the shoes she wanted to wear tonight. They should be right here, third pair from the wall, but there’s an empty space where her hand comes down in the closet.

 _Dammit_.

She’s already been enough out of sorts over this date that a missing pair of shoes is probably going to send her into a tantrum. Why couldn’t this be easier?

Her shoes might be under her bed, or they might have been kicked into the front hall closet. Either way, she’s not about to go digging about on all fours. She feels around until she finds another pair that she hopes will work just as well.

He’s a man. Since when did men ever notice shoes?

 _He notices everything_ , she hears Mary Margaret’s voice echo in her head, but she quashes the thought. Tonight, she’s been left to her own devices for their date. Nobody pointing out which underwear she should wear, or asking her if she might want to pick a different shade of lipstick. She loves her extended family, she does, but she doesn’t want them whispering in her ear when she’s already so unsure about what she’s doing with the good doctor. She’s already read him the riot act earlier this week; Emma and Mary Margaret standing over her shoulder when she opens the door would probably send him running straight for the hills.

Never mind that if they were there, she’d at least know where her goddamn shoes are.

She eases into the shoes she’s chosen and guides herself down the stairs, counting steps along the way. According to the Amazon Echo Emma gave her for her birthday, she still has a good eight minutes before Robin picks her up. Enough time to settle herself on the couch in her living room, enough time to get her breathing back to something resembling normal.

Enough time to pick at her skirt and shift back and forth on the couch. God, she shouldn’t be this nervous. Their first date had gone well enough; why was she still panicking like a teenager?

 _Because you like him_ , she whispers to herself.

She does. She really, really does.

He rings the doorbell right at 5pm, and the sound of the chimes almost sends her right out of her skin. She makes her way to the door, grateful for the 120-watt bulbs Mary Margaret put in all of her light fixtures. She greets him shyly, but he isn’t nearly so reserved. He pulls her to him and kisses her. Tonight, he doesn’t taste like beignets and beer; he tastes like coffee and smells like woodsmoke. She’s used to her other senses being heightened, but his fingers on her hips and his lips on hers are almost enough to make her legs give out from underneath her.

Thank God he’s strong enough to hold her up. She rests her forehead against his, gasping a little for breath, before she manages to choke out a  _hello_.

“Hi,” he echoes. “Ready to go?”

_Go? Were they going somewhere other than upstairs?_

He chuckles at her breathless response. “Weren’t you going to take me to your favorite places?”

Right, that. Never mind that her favorite place is her bed, and she desperately wants to feel his skin against her very expensive sheets. It’s only the second date, though, and she’s still enough of her mother’s daughter to remember that a lady doesn’t drag a gentleman caller upstairs just because he  _smells_  good.

She reaches out to the coat rack that she knows is just a few feet to her left, but before she can find her coat, he has it in his hands and is tucking her into it. He’s  _good_  at this. He guides her out the door, steadying her hand as she pushes the key in the lock. If she stumbles a little over the steps of her front porch, he doesn’t comment. He just wraps his arm a little more securely around her waist and steadies her.

She can’t quite catch her breath; he doesn’t miss a beat as he talks to her about his day, his drive to her house. He seems completely unaffected by her presence, and she’s got just enough vanity left to be offended by that.

He follows her directions to the Greek Taverna and surrenders his keys to the valet, but manages to make his way to the passenger door before she can get her purse situated on her arm. It’s been so long since someone opened doors for her without a pitying sigh behind it; the fact that he’s doing it just to impress her isn’t lost on her.

Maybe he’s not completely unaffected by her presence, after all.

Meg is delighted to see her; it’s been months since she’s been to the restaurant, and it’s probably been years since she’s been there with anyone other than Emma and Henry. Meg doesn’t even bother with menus. She leans down and whispers in Regina’s ear that she’ll take care of everything.

Between Robin and Meg, she’s not sure what she’s doing here. He fetches and carries, she serves and laughs. Regina sits in her chair, grateful that all her best laid plans are coming to fruition without any help from her.

Still, she promised him a night out. She should at least do  _something_. If she can’t order for them, she can at least let him know that she’s glad he’s here. She scoots her chair a little closer to him and laces her fingers through his. “It may not be beignets and beer,” she whispers into his ear, “but I think you’ll still like it.”

His fingers tighten around hers, and he tucks their joined hands into his lap. Oh, God, in his lap…she can feel the heat rising from his skin and she can barely breathe around it.

“I do like it,” he answers. “I’m sure it will taste like heaven.”

***

They make it through dinner and dessert, and a few shots of ouzo with coffee beans. She leads him out of the restaurant and through the criss-crossing paths of the town square, relying on instinct rather than vision. She points out her favorite spots to eat lunch and Henry’s favorite spots to play make-believe. They laugh at the still-lit windows of Watertown’s municipal building, Regina wondering just who is burning the midnight oil when she’s not there to supervise.

He walks slowly, her arm tucked in his, listening as she talks about just how she came to be the city manager. She’s talking too much, words tripping over her tongue, but he doesn’t interrupt her. He seems perfectly happy to listen, perfectly happy to guide her along cracked sidewalks that have repairs listed in her budget.

It isn’t what she planned – no pre-dinner cocktails, no late night showing of Sunset Boulevard - but it’s enough.  He’s happy to walk with her, occasionally stopping to kiss her. She’s happy to wrap herself in his arms every time he tugs her a little closer to him.

It isn’t what she planned, but it’s the best date she’s ever been on.

Someday, in the not-too-distant-future, she’ll ask him to take her to his favorite places in Boston. Someday, she’ll learn as much about him as he’s learned about her tonight.

Someday will come soon enough, but tonight, she doesn’t settle for a kiss on her front porch. She pulls him in and guides him up the 17 steps to her upstairs hallway and the 22 steps to her bedroom door.

She didn’t plan for him to spend the night, but he’s here, and she’s here, and plans change.

She didn’t plan for this, but she’s so, so glad that her plans have changed.


	7. Chapter 7

_Sex changes everything._

She’s ready for this, she thinks, but she can’t stop that little voice in her head that reminds her that there’s no going back from sleeping with him. His lips are on hers, his hands are digging into her sides, and she’s shamelessly grinding on the thigh that’s wedged itself between her legs.

Sex changes everything, and in the morning light, she won’t be able to see if he’s happy, or sheepish, or trying desperately to sneak out without meeting her eyes. She should have thought of this before she dragged him up to her bedroom, but apparently her libido was also heightened by her loss of vision. If she could just turn off her brain and surrender to his touch, she could have a  _very_  good night.

 _Sex changes everything._  Her brain pipes up again, overriding her libido, and she realizes she’s not ready for what she has with him to change. Even if it’s only been two dates and a few late-night phone calls, she’s not ready to let go of the promise of what comes next in favor of the reality.

“Stop,” she whispers. She takes a step back, then another, just out of his reach.

“You all right?” he asks.

She’s not all right. She’s wound up and tense and scared and turned on. Every nerve in her body is humming at the nearness of him. The few steps she took away from him have her calves brushing against her mattress, and she desperately wants to pull him down with her, but a lady doesn’t do that on the second date.

She tries to tug her dress back down over her legs, tries to smooth her professional persona over the skin that’s burning for his touch, but she can’t quite keep her balance and falls onto the bed.

_Oh God, she’s made a mess of this, and it’s only their second date._

“I…I just…”

He interrupts her before she can think of how to finish the sentence.

“You’re not ready for this.”

She isn’t. She wants to be ready,  _oh God, she wants to be ready_ , and her body is telling her she’s so  _very_  ready, but she’s not. She barely knows him, the logical part of her whispers.  _You know enough_ , the woman in her snaps. The warring voices in her head are almost enough to make her forget that he’s standing in front of her, his pants undone, probably more than a little upset that she’s not going to finish what she started.

This is why she doesn’t date. “I’m sorry,” she says. Sorry for what, exactly, she can’t quite summarize. Sorry for inviting him upstairs, yes. Sorry for digging her hands into his pants, definitely. Sorry for turning cold and turning away from him…sorry doesn’t even begin to cover it.

He doesn’t answer right away, and the silence terrifies her. She’s used to silence, but not like this. She’s used to trying to find another person through sound and touch, but not here, where sound and touch should be easy. If she could just  _see_ him, just read the expression on his face, she could fix this, but the lamp on her bedside table isn’t bright enough, and she can barely make out the shadow where he stands.

“Regina, if you’re not ready, you’re not ready.”

The shadow doesn’t move. Doesn’t come closer, doesn’t disappear into the halo of light she can make out from the hallway. She might think she was imagining him altogether if she couldn’t hear the hitch in his breath.

“I’m sorry,” she repeats. She buries her face in her hands.

“Hey,” he says. The mattress shifts next to her, and her wrists are tugged away from her face. He’s sitting next to her, and the fact that she can’t bear to look at him head-on means that she can still make him out from the corner of her eye. Damn that peripheral vision for still being fully functional. He’s smiling at her. He should be out the door and halfway back to Boston, but he’s  _smiling_  at her, and his thumbs are circling the soft skin on her wrists.

“Nothing to apologize for,” he reassures her. He laces his fingers through hers, but this time he lets them  come to rest on the space between them. His skin and hers, entertwined  on her very expensive sheets, and again she feels the need to apologize. To him, or herself, she’s not sure.

“I should go,” he says, but before he can disentangle his hands from hers, she pulls him a little closer.

“Stay,” she whispers. “Not for that, but…stay.”

“Are you sure you’re ready for this?” he asks.

She’s ready to go to sleep with Robin holding her in his arms. She’s ready to wake up, for the first time in years, trying to shift around another body in her bed. The rest of it will come later.

“Stay,” she repeats, and he tugs at her hands, pulling them onto the mattress until she curls up against him, the soft fabric of his t-shirt pressed against her face.

She counts his breaths and his heartbeats, minute by minute, beat by beat, until they slow into the deep rhythm of sleep. She lets the steady rise and fall of his chest lull her into a deep, dreamless sleep.

When she wakes in the morning, her bed is empty. She fights back disappointment, reminding herself that she should have expected this, but before she can wrap her mind around it, she catches a whiff of coffee in the air.

Her robe is laid out on the foot of her bed, and she wraps it around herself and ties the sash in a knot before she makes her way down the steps, one hand on the wall to guide her progress.

33 steps from the stairs to the kitchen. When she gets there, she hears him humming. Coffee, yes, but also cinnamon and butter.

“Breakfast,” he says. “Your stomach has been grumbling for the past two hours.”

Liar. She’s not even the slightest bit hungry, but she’s not going to argue. “Smells delicious,” she says, because it does. She settles herself into one of the barstools at the kitchen island and waits for him to bring her a mug of coffee.

“Are you ready for this?” he asks as he guides her hands around the handle of the mug.

She is.

***

“What do you mean, he spent the night and cooked you breakfast?”

The one morning Regina Mills puts off doing the dishes in favor of lounging on the couch and daydreaming about her night and morning with the good doctor was of course the morning that she’s asked Emma and Henry to pick her up on the way to his baseball game. Which would have been fine if Emma came in through the front door like a normal guest, but she always parks in the back and lets herself in through the kitchen, where she no doubt got a good eyeful of two coffee mugs and two half-eaten omelets on Regina’s best china.

She’s no doubt getting a good eyeful of Regina as well, with beard burn on her chin, kiss swollen lips, and a robe that doesn’t hide the fact that she has next to nothing on underneath. Regina can only imagine the look of shock on her friend’s face, but…she doesn’t care.

It’s been a long time since a man made her breakfast; longer still since a man kissed her senseless in her kitchen, and if the price to pay for that is the third degree from Emma, she’ll gladly take it.


	8. Chapter 8

f there’s one thing she could say about Mary Margaret, it’s that she has an overdeveloped sense of occasion. A schoolteacher left to her own devices on winter break, Mary Margaret had been looking for a project to occupy her time, but  _why_ that project had to include her office suite was beyond her.

Still, as she made her way to her desk, she couldn’t help but begrudgingly admire the lights strung up around the doorframe, over the windows, and bordering her desk. She was reminded of countless flight attendants gesturing to emergency lighting leading to over-wing exits and had to fight back a chuckle. She could only hope that Mary Margaret had enough sense to tape down the cords so that she didn’t wind up facedown on the cool marble floor, felled by the holiday spirit.

Her office smelled like pine and cinnamon, no doubt coming from the giant, triangular, dark blur marked by pinpoints of light taking up space by her picture windows. From what she could make out, the tree was at least two, if not three, feet taller than she was. Lord only knows how Mary Margaret managed to wrangle it into the city manager’s offices. 

She was halfway through a conference call when her door opened, and she didn’t even bother to look up as her guest poked his head around the office door. The late afternoon sun had sunk below her windows, so she couldn’t see him, but the smell of cedar and sandalwood, mixed with the North Carolina fir taking up residence in the window, left her no doubt as to who was settling himself in her guest chair.  _Robin_.

He’d called her this morning, finding himself with two cancelled late afternoon appointments in a row, and hoping for an evening with her to fill his unplanned free time. She should have said no, but it was the holidays. She might have given up on Santa bringing her a pony, but she wasn’t quite ready to give up on a few happy surprises in this holiday season. She rushed through the remainder of the call, promising that the Watertown utilitiy workers would have a wage raise in the new year, and dropped her phone back into its cradle.

“Festive,” he said, and she could hear the grin in his voice. She nodded in agreement, smiling shyly at him. 

“Who doesn’t love Christmas?” she asked.

“Well, I was hoping you’d say that, because I have something decidedly Christmassy planned for the rest of your day. How does a walk in the snow and some hot chocolate sound to you?”

It sounded heavenly, but then, he could have proposed looking over her tax returns and she would have agreed that it was a great way to spend the evening as long as he suggested it with that slight hint of an English accent. 

He pushed himself out of the chair and came around her desk, lacing his fingers into the hand that still rested on her mouse and pulling her up to him. “I’ll get your coat, and we’ll get out of here, yes?”

 _Yes. Please, yes._ She shrugged into her coat and let him tie her scarf around her neck. He handed her the gloves that were stuffed into her coat pocket and waited as she tugged them over her fingers before once again taking her hand. Ever the gentleman, he took her hand and rested it on the crook of her arm, taking just a second to squeeze her fingers with his own and drop a quick kiss on her cheek.

“Away we go,” he said softly. They headed to her office door, Regina more than ready to leave the workday behind, but he stopped short in the doorframe.

“What?” she asked. 

He just chuckled a little under his breath. “Now I know you didn’t do the decorating,” he said. 

She rolled her eyes at that. Of course she didn’t do the decorating. “What gave it away?” she asked drily.

“Well, Miss Mills,” he said as his hand came up to cup her cheek, “I can’t picture you being so bold as to hang mistletoe above your door.”

Mistletoe?  _Dammit, Mary Margaret_. She had half a mind to dig out her phone and call Mary Margaret to demand that she get her perky ass over here right now and take down every single decoration, but when his lips found hers, she lost all train of thought. He kissed her thoroughly, then kissed her again, then rubbed his nose against hers.

He did that, kissed her senseless and then followed up with a small tender gesture that showed her that he saw her as something more than just a woman. Something more precious and powerful altogether. She couldn’t see the light in his eyes, but she could feel the tingle in her lips and the goosebumps on her arms from his nearness. She could hear the slight rasp in his breathing that told her that she wasn’t the only one left a little breathless from his kisses. She could taste him and feel him, and that was enough for her.

“Merry Christmas,” he said with a whisper.

She didn’t trust herself to form words to reply, just hummed in response. He laced his fingers through hers and drew her out the door and down the hall, into his warm car and off on a Christmas adventure through the holiday light show in the park and the promised hot chocolate.

When he finally dropped her off at home with a kiss and a promise to see her in a few days, she allowed herself a few minutes in the hallway to daydream about the next time she’d see him before she dug out her phone and told Siri to text Mary Margaret.

“Mistletoe? Need I remind you,  _I work there!_ ”

Her phone buzzed a second later, and she tapped it to answer the call.

“Mistletoe?“ Mary Margaret asked, a little bit of confusion in her voice. “I said I’d decorate. I didn’t say I’d embarrass you. Lord only knows what that assistant of yours would try to lay on you if he saw some mistletoe.”

“So you didn’t hang mistletoe in my doorway?”

There was a slight pause. “No. Why? Did someone tell you I did? Regina Mills, did you make out with a hot doctor in your office just because he told you there was  _mistletoe_?”

“Good night, Mary Margaret,” she said firmly. She pulled the phone from her ear, struggling to find the button to disconnect the call, but not before she heard Mary Margaret’s screeching “DID YOU MAKE OUT ON YOUR DESK? PLEASE TELL ME YOU DID.”

She finally managed to disconnect the call, but not before Mary Margaret’s cackles of delight echoed through her front hallway. 

Robin Locksley, using her impaired vision to talk her into kissing him. She’d get him back for that, somehow. Somehow, when she figured out for herself how exactly she’d been wronged. 

In the meantime, she was going to tuck herself into bed and dream sweet Christmas dreams of him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please accept my apologies for switching from present to past tense. I wrote this based on prompts and didn't keep track of my verb tenses :)


	9. Chapter 9

“I was thinking about this weekend,” Robin says. He pushes her mug toward her, topped off with the last of the coffee and just a splash of milk. Just the way she likes it.

She hums as she takes a sip. God, the man makes good coffee. In the three months they’ve been dating, her favorite barista at Starbucks has been completely abandoned. Why pay a stranger to make her coffee, when she can just roll over in the morning and nudge Robin instead? “What about this weekend?”

“It’s my weekend with Roland,” he says, “and I thought…maybe it’s time he meets you?”

She stiffens and drops the mug on the counter with enough force that a few drops splash over the lip. Where’s the damn napkin? She scrabbles her fingertips along the counter, only to come into contact with Robin’s hand.

“Relax, Regina. It’s a four-year-old, not the Spanish Inquisition.”

She remembers Henry well enough at four years old to know that the two are really  _not_  that different.

 _Deep breaths, deep breaths, and count to ten_. She waits for the sound of her heartbeat to slow in her eardrums. “Are you sure we’re ready for that? Meeting Roland is a big step, and it’s not one that we can undo.”

“I thought we were both on the same page about moving forward? Meeting Roland is the next logical step.” She can hear a quick intake of breath. “Or maybe I’m wrong?”

She laces her fingers through his and gives his hand a squeeze. “No, no, this isn’t about us. Please don’t think this is about us.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s your son. And your ex-wife. He’s your priority, and she’s always going to be in your life. She’s always going to want to know the people that you introduce to your son. Are you ready for that to be me?”

 _Am I ready for that to be me_? It’s not about her, not really, but a little part of her is willing to admit that it is. Still, the adult, responsible Regina remembers Emma being heartbroken over the end of her first serious post-Henry relationship, and Henry asking over and over again what happened to August. Being a sideline spectator in that drama was hard enough; she doesn’t particularly want to take on a starring role if it’s going to end badly for another little boy.

Still, she’s heard enough stories about Roland to want to meet the little boy. She’s heard enough about Marian too, these last few months, that she can’t help but be curious about Roland’s mother. What was it that drove them apart? How can she not make the same mistakes?

“Yes,” he says, and he’s using his Dr. Locksley voice, calm and reassuring. “Yes, I’m ready for it to be you, and yes, Marian is ready to meet you and vet you before you even so much as say hello to my son. Regina, this isn’t our first time around the block. Marian is living with someone; do you think she would have taken that step without involving me as well?”

Given what she knows of Robin’s ex-wife, Regina would guess no, but given what she knows of parents in general (and shitty parents in particular), she’s not going to volunteer an answer. “I just don’t want this to be something you’ll regret,” she says.

He tugs her to her feet and wraps his arms around her waist, pulling her so close she can hardly breathe against the scent of him, warm and soft and slightly smoky. “Never going to happen,” he growls, before his lips find hers.

***

In the few months they’d been dating, they’d had more than a few chances to talk about past relationships. She didn’t like to talk about Daniel; the pain of losing him in a car accident was still something that weighed heavily on her chest. Robin, though, had no problems talking about the start – and end – of his relationship with Marian.

 _Tell me what made you fall in love with her_ , she’d asked, and he was only too happy to answer.

“Her voice. She always sounded so decisive, so sure. When I met her, I had no idea what I was doing with my life, and she always seemed to have the right answer.”

 _I can relate,_ she’d thought.

Now, as she sits in the diner down the block from Robin’s apartment, she can only hope to find some small measure of that tranquility. She has no doubt that if Marian doesn’t like her, her relationship is over. Never mind the fact that the people of Watertown seem to like her just fine, fine enough to keep electing her to office – her entire self-worth rests on her boyfriend’s ex-wife’s opinion of her, and she hates knowing that no speech or cleverly argued union agreement is going to save her now.

Robin is running late, not an unusual occurrence given his career choice, but she could really use a little pep talk right now, or even just the familiar weight of his hand on her back. Instead, she’s picking at what’s supposed to be a Caesar salad.  _Who orders a Caesar salad at a diner_ , Emma’s voice echoes in her head, and Regina can’t help but acknowledge that Emma might have had a point all these years that they’ve been having this argument.

“Who orders a Caesar salad at a diner,” comes a voice over her shoulder, and Regina can feel the slight shift in the air kicked up by a pair of gloves and a purse slapped on the counter. “I’m Marian, by the way. I’m guessing you’re Regina? Robin said to look for someone in a suit eating a salad.”

Great, just great. Robin’s ex-wife was  _Emma_. She holds out her hand in the general direction of the seat next to her. “Regina Mills.”

The hand that shakes hers is firm and confident. “Marian. I’m ordering a burger and fries. You’re welcome to some of the fries.”

They make small talk as Marian waits for her food, and it’s not exactly uncomfortable. Boston traffic, irritating coworkers, and schedule changes that interfere with lunch. In another life, one where she didn’t feel that every tiny tic of her muscles was being evaluated and graded, Regina would like Marian. Makes sense, since she likes Emma just fine, and Marian seems to have the same knack for saying whatever enters her brain at any given time, whether or not it’s appropriate. When her food arrives, Marian shoves half her fries onto Regina’s half-eaten salad, then takes Regina’s hand and guides them to the nice little pile of fries. “Ketchup or ranch?” Marian asks.

“Ketchup,” Regina answers automatically, and she can hear the telltale squirt of a plastic bottle.

“On your right,” Marian says, and Regina is grateful that Marian didn’t try to guide her to the plate of ketchup. If Robin’s ex-wife didn’t think she was capable of finding a plate of ketchup for her fries, how would she ever trust her to spend time with her son?

The fries are good, crispy and salty on the outside, and fluffy on the inside. She digs into them, mirroring Marian’s contented hum as she works her way through a lunch that would surely send her mother into a stroke if she could see it. Nothing unusual about two women having lunch together, except that Regina can practically feel the weight of Marian’s stare with every bite she takes, but she squares her shoulders and stabs her fries into the last remaining bits of ketchup on the plate.

Is she supposed to speak first? Should she tell Marian her intentions? She has no idea what the proper protocol is here.

“You know, Robin and I were friends long before we started dating,” Marian says, interrupting her train of thought, “and we were friends long after we split up. It’s not easy, breaking up a marriage when you have a son, but it could be a lot worse.”

“I suppose,” Regina agrees, careful in her tone. Marian could be giving her an opening or warning her to be on her guard, but since she can’t read Marian’s expression, she has absolutely no defense here.

“He hates Thai food,” Marian says. “He hates football and Hemingway.”

 _Well, who doesn’t hate Hemingway_ , Regina thinks, but keeps her mouth shut.

“He can’t stand superhero movies because he thinks the plots are completely implausible,” Marian continues. “I’m not saying that any of these things are a deal-breaker, but put together….he drove me nuts. Also, you should hear him go off if the laundry stays in the dryer for a few days.”

_Who leaves their laundry in the dryer for a few days?_

“Let me guess,” Marian says, “you take the clothes out of the dryer and put them away immediately?”

“They get wrinkled,” she protests weakly.

“I guess they do. Well, if your laundry night isn’t Friday, maybe you could spare some time to play host to my son?”

“Maybe I could. And I can promise you, the sheets won’t be wrinkled.”

Marian laughs. “No. No, I don’t think they will.”

***

It wasn’t much of a fight over the bill; Regina promised that Marian’s son would be perfectly safe in her home, wrinkle-free sheets and all, as long as Marian would let her pay for lunch. She’s just tucking her credit card back into its slot in her wallet when Robin curls his arm around her waist.

“Sorry I’m late,” he says. “No blood on the walls, so I’m guessing it went well?”

 _Well enough_. “So, this weekend? Maybe we camp out in the living room and roast some marshmallows over the fire?”

“He’ll love it,” Robin agrees. “His little feet are as cold as yours. A gas fireplace and some roasted marshmallows will be exactly what he needs.”

A night in her living room with Robin, his son and a plate of chocolate bars, graham crackers and marshmallows. Maybe it’s exactly what they all need. If her white furniture gets smeared with little handprints, she has a cleaner that can handle it.

She’s got experience with little boys, after all. Tiny handprints are the least of her worries.

***

She worried about having a toddler in her house. Her furniture was all sharp corners and clean lines, just perfect to send a small boy running through the living room to the ER with a busted skull.

 _He’s a kid, not the Mona Lisa_ , Emma said, perfectly content to let Henry loose in her living room and damn the consequences.

Henry managed to send her favorite pair of shoes down the disposal –  _what kid does that_  – and rip her carefully chosen curtains right off the walls before Emma wrangled him into his pack-and-play. She loved Henry, but she never let him out of her sight again, not until the day he looked at his mother over Regina’s coffee table and asked her if she was raised in a barn, because only an animal would put her feet on a table like that.

Roland, bless his heart, seemed much happier to curl into her side. They’ve just finished Wreck-It Ralph, and she can feel him shift against her as he lets loose a yawn. “Are you tired, sweetie?” she asks, reaching out to run her fingers through his hair. It’s thick and curly – he must have his mother’s hair. She tugs at a tangle or two with a smile.

“Can I have a bedtime story?”

“Did you mum pack you some books? I’ll read one of them to you,” his father promises.

“No, Daddy, I want Regina to read to me.” He keeps pleading, his voice trailing away as Regina listens to the stairs creak as Robin carries his son upstairs.

She used to love reading to Henry. Back when he was a little younger than Roland, reading to him was the way that she finally figured out how to bond with the little boy, and every time Emma dropped him off at her house, he had a bag full of books. Emma was never much of a reader, and Henry used to complain that she didn’t read right. Too many arms being thrown around and way too many silly voices, especially right before bed. Somewhere in her guest room, she’s pretty sure she still has a stack of books that Henry has collected over the years. It’s a damn shame that even the large print meant for little eyes is too small for her to read now.

Still, she’s not helpless, she reminds herself. She can still read, even if it’s just a few words at a time on her iPad. She asks Siri to download one of Henry’s favorites and makes her way up the stairs, one hand cradling her iPad and the other guiding her steps along the banister. Ferdinand, the sweet bull who only wants to smell the flowers – the perfect bedtime story for a little boy.

He’s out before she even gets halfway through the book, she can tell, his breathing even against her skin. She eases him under the covers and tugs them up, then reaches out for Robin’s hand. He helps her off the bed and pulls her close. “See, easy as pie,” he whispers into her ear.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” she chuckles, “but it’s nice to know I can still do this.”

Robin presses a kiss to her forehead. “I never had any doubt.” With that, he snaps off the light and leads Regina by the hand down to her bedroom. Not because she needs him to, but because he wants to keep hold of her as long as possible.

It’s nice to know that she can still do  _that_ , too.


	10. Chapter 10

Of all the things that she thought would send her over the edge, she never expected a bag of lettuce to be the culprit. She has her fridge sectioned out by date of purchase, and the lettuce should have held on until the weekend at least, but she reaches in to grab a handful for a sandwich…it’s wet and slimy and reeks of rot.

 _Dammit_. She paid eight bucks for the organic spring greens, and that eight bucks is turning into a science project in her fridge. She tosses the bag in the general direction of the trash and slams the door to the refrigerator shut. Another day of takeout in her office for lunch. If her medical bills don’t bankrupt her, her grocery bills are definitely going to do the trick.

She has several cans of soup and a stack of leftovers, but she wanted a salad today. She’s given up enough over the last few years…she at least deserves an organic salad when the mood strikes, with some goat cheese and that extra-fancy balsamic vinegar Emma brought back for her from her week in wine country.

Just a fucking salad…is that too much to ask?

***

She’s digging through her vegetable drawers, tossing zucchini that’s just a little too soft and red peppers that give at the slightest pressure, when Robin makes his way downstairs. Good thing he’s finally awake – she needs someone to read the expiration dates for the condiments in the refrigerator door.

She doesn’t bother to reply to his  _good morning_ , just holds out a tub of what she thinks is Greek yogurt for his examination. “Is this still good?”

“The morning or the butter?” he asks.  _Butter_. Dammit. Where the hell is the yogurt? She tosses it on the counter and resumes digging through the fridge.

“I guess that’s a no for the morning. The butter, yes. Still good. Unopened, actually.”

“Great. Now where the hell is the yogurt?” She has her head and more than half her upper body buried in the fridge, until his hands come to rest on her hips and pull her back.

“The yogurt is on the floor next to the trash can. Why it’s there, I’m not sure, but I’m guessing you have a reason?”

She turns and slumps against the counter, using her shoulder to nudge the door to the fridge shut. Just because she’s having a meltdown doesn’t mean she needs to defrost her entire kitchen in the process. “My lettuce is dead,” she says.

“My deepest condolences.”

“It’s not funny,” she snaps. It’s not funny to her, anyway, but she can tell by the way he’s holding his breath that he’s trying to keep from laughing at her. “I just wanted a salad,” she sighs.

“So why the butter? Is that an American thing?”

“No, it’s a  _blind_  thing. I wanted a salad, but the lettuce is rotten, and I figured I should see what else in the fridge is expired and just waiting to poison me.”

“Ah,” he says. She can hear the faint whoosh of the refrigerator door breaking its seal and the chilly air makes the hair on her arms stand on end. “Well, let’s take a look.” He starts going through her fridge with the same precision he treated her macular dystrophy, considering each item carefully before putting it back in its place or setting it on the counter to be tossed.

“I don’t need you to do this for me,” she says. She’s being more than a little petulant, since she absolutely does need him to do this for her, but she resents like hell needing anyone to do anything for her as simple as making sure she doesn’t get botulism from the contents of her very carefully ordered refrigerator.

“I’m here,” he says, “and I don’t want to be poisoned by expired lunchmeat either.” He’s always so reasonable. Most of the time, she appreciates it, but today, it’s irritating the fuck out of her. She’s tempted to make him a sandwich with the lunchmeat that she’s 100% certain is perfectly fine and then throw some organic lettuce sludge on top.

And, since he’s always so damn reasonable, he probably won’t even be mad at her.

The kitchen has gone quiet while she stood sulking and plotting sending her boyfriend through a round of what would most likely wind up being painful diarrhea and possibly more than a little vomiting. “What?” she hisses through clenched teeth.

“You’re mad at me.”

“I told you I don’t need help, and you’re helping me anyway.” This might be the most ridiculous line she’s ever used to provoke a fight in her life, but it comes out anyway. Yes, how dare he stoop so low as to help her? She should kick him out now before he does something really evil, like tell her he loves her.

He huffs, and her eyebrows shoot up in surprise. Of all the sounds she’s ever heard him make, and over the past several months, she’s heard a lot, she’s never heard him make  _that_  one. It sounds just a little too much like her mother for her comfort. “Fine,” he spits. “If you don’t want my help, then I’ll go get dressed. I have to get to work anyway.”

 _Shit_. She bangs her head against the side of the fridge, muttering apologies that he can’t hear as he stomps up the stairs.

“There’s another tub of yogurt behind the eggs,” he shouts down from the landing.

She digs around until she finds it and pops the lid. A quick sniff tells her that it’s still good. She may  not be able to have a salad, but at least she can make something resembling a healthy breakfast.

 _After_  she apologizes. Out loud.

***

He’s still in the shower, so she settles herself on the closed lid of the toilet and tucks his towel into her lap. The steam from the shower will be hell on her hair, but she figures that he might be more willing to hear her apology if he’s naked.

She can hear him muttering to himself as he slams the bottle of bodywash back into the shower caddy. On to plan B – she’s already showered this morning, but maybe he really needs to hear her apology when  _she’s_  naked. She hangs his towel back on the hook and strips down, tossing her robe and underwear somewhere in the vicinity of the hamper.

He doesn’t make a sound when she pulls the curtain back, but she can see him well enough to catch him turning his back to her. She steps in behind him and rests her hands on the smooth planes of his back.

“I’m sorry,” she says. Again, no response, and she can feel his muscles tighten as he tries to ignore her presence. She’s going to have to work a little harder for this apology. Fair enough, he’s certainly put up with more than he deserves from her over the last few months. Her arms slide around him to wrap around his waist, and she presses her body more fully against him. “I’m really sorry,” she whispers again, this time into the smooth skin of his shoulder.

He lets loose a sigh and relaxes, just a fraction of a bit, against her. “I know it’s hard, Regina, but I’m not your enemy.”

She lets her hands drift lazily up and down his chest. “No, you’re not. You’re my best friend in this, and I’m grateful. It’s just…Robin, it’s hard. It’s hard, and I’m scared, and I’m taking it out on you. And I really am sorry.” She kisses him, just where his neck meets his shoulder, one of her favorite parts of the body she’s come to know so well.

He still doesn’t turn to face her, but his fingers come up to tangle with hers and press them against his chest. “You really hate admitting that, don’t you?” he asks, and she can hear the humor creep back into his voice.

“I really do,” she agrees, before stopping to consider his words. “Wait, what? That I’m sorry, or that it’s hard?”

“Both,” he says without missing a beat, and she can’t help but laugh because he’s right. He finally turns around and pulls her close, and the water is beating right into her face, but she’s not going to complain because he’s got his face nuzzled into her neck, and when he’s kissing her neck like that, she suddenly can’t remember why a damn salad seemed like the end of the world to her.

“I’m sorry that it’s hard for you,” he says. “But I’m not sorry I’m trying to make it easier. And I’m not sorry that I’m going to keep trying to make it easier.”

She shivers again, despite the water that’s just a little too hot for her taste. “You do make it easier. I’m just…not used to people doing that for me.”

He pulls away just a little bit, and a second later, she can feel the temperature of the water drop to something a little less scalding. Again, taking care of her. “Maybe I just wish there were something I could do to take care of you for a change.”

Robin laughs. “You’re naked in the shower with me. Sweetheart, I’m a simple man. That’s really all I need.”

“Really? Me, naked in the shower is all you need?”

“Well,” he says, his hands starting to drift from her waist to other, more enticing parts of her body. “It’s not all I need. But it’s a start.”

“Thank God,” she whispers before she captures his mouth with her own.


	11. Chapter 11

She’s not used to having a house full of noise, but Robin’s son…even if she can’t see him, she can hear him from a mile away. She’s lost count of all the times Robin has reminded Roland to use his inside voice. She doesn’t think he  _has_  an inside voice, but she’s not going to tell Robin that.

Roland has adjusted pretty well to spending weekends with Regina. He likes the big house – so much more room than his father’s townhouse in Boston – and he likes trying to climb the apple trees in the backyard. He likes camping out in a nest of pillows in the living room while they watch movies in the evening, burrowing against Regina as she inches closer and closer to the big-screen TV to make out the characters.

He likes helping her make popcorn at night, and breakfast in the morning. She likes it too. When Henry was little, she’d keep him for overnights, and having Roland in her house reminds her of those days when she’d wake up to Henry perched at the end of her bed, waiting for her to kick off the covers and make pancakes for them.

She can still make the batter, as long as Robin lays out the ingredients for her, but she leaves it to him to pour and flip, and she leaves it to Roland to place the chocolate chips as the pancakes bubble and brown.

They’re nearly done with breakfast when Robin’s phone rings, and she can tell by the tension in his voice that it’s his office manager. His new associate is proving to be more trouble than he’s worth – top of his class and smart, but increasingly unreliable when it comes to arriving on time, and she’s heard enough about Robin’s patients complaining about his bedside manner to know that his days are limited, at best. She waves in the general direction of where he’s sitting and assures him that she’ll get Roland cleaned up while he deals with this latest crisis.

She holds out her hand. “Come on, Roland. You need a shower. You’re covered in syrup, aren’t you?”

He doesn’t respond, but his father does. “Use your words, son.”

She blesses him for the reminder. Roland tends to respond to questions with hums or gestures, and as much as she doesn’t want to admit it, it eats away at her that she can’t see them. He takes her hand, small fingers sticky and messy, and she tugs him to the staircase.

“We’ll make it quick, then we’ll go to the park,” she promises.

She’s in the bathroom, twisting the knobs to get the temperature just right, when she hears it. Roland refused to shower without the Star Wars towels that she kept on hand for Henry’s visits, and she’d sent him out to the linen closet to fetch them while she lined up soap and shampoo. She hears a crash, and a series of thuds, and a scream that curdles her blood in her veins. She goes running out of the bathroom and comes to a halt at the head of the stairs, her hand resting on the banister. From below, she can hear Roland’s whimpers and his father’s voice, whispering soft reassurances.

She doesn’t know what’s worse, that she didn’t see Roland take a header down the stairs, or that she can’t see them now and know how bad the damage she’s done has caused. She sinks down against the banister and forces herself to breathe.

The echo of Robin’s steps up the staircase pulls her back into herself. She can just make out the shadow of him approaching through her peripheral vision, two large grey blurs indicating father and son. “First aid kit?” he asks, and her hands clench into fists. Roland is hurt on her watch, enough to need first aid. His mother, as generous as she was with letting Regina into Roland's life didn’t love the idea of Roland spending weekends with his daddy’s girlfriend. And now  _this_. She’ll be shocked if she ever gets to see Roland again, whether it be his mother’s decision, or his father’s.

“Under the sink,” she whispers.

She’s still leaning against the banister when she hears them come out of the bathroom, Roland happily chattering away about climbing trees and digging in the dirt and his new Spongebob band-aids. Yet another relic from the days when Henry was smaller and she could kiss away his boo-boos before delivering him, relatively unharmed and mostly patched-up, to his mother.

“You still need a shower,” Robin says, and Regina’s lips curl into an involuntary smile when she hears Roland whine. “You’re covered in syrup and chocolate. You stay in the bathroom, and we’ll be there in a moment. Try not to fall into the toilet, please.”

She can hear him approaching, and she curls herself into a ball before he can settle next to her at the top of the stairs. He wraps his arm around her shoulders and tugs her against him. She wants to fight and pull herself away, but she can’t resist the simple comfort of his skin against hers.

“He’s fine,” Robin whispers. “Skinned elbow and a bump on his head, but he’s fine. Kids fall down stairs.”

“I didn’t see…” she starts, but her voice hitches in her throat. “Even if I’d been standing right there, I wouldn’t have seen him go down. I couldn’t have done anything.”

He sighs and pulls her just a little bit closer. “Regina, I was standing right there. I saw him slip and I saw him bounce down every single step, and there was still nothing I could do. Kids fall. Kids wreck their bikes. Kids break their arms, and their legs, and they heal and life goes on.”

It sounds perfectly reasonable, with that British accent. Almost enough that she believes it. “Marian wouldn’t have let this happen.”

Robin snorts. “Marian left a pot of pasta on the stove while she answered a phone call, and Roland dumped it on his head. We took him to the ER and we had DCFS grilling us in the waiting room. Kids do stupid things, no matter how closely you watch them.”

That’s the heart of the problem, isn’t it? “But I can’t watch him, Robin. You know that, and you know it’s only going to get worse from here. And if he gets hurt –  _really hurt_  – when I’m there, and I can’t stop it, you’re never going to forgive me. Marian will kill me. And I don’t want to put you in that position.”

He takes a deep breath, and she can feel his long, measured exhale against her neck. She expects him to argue with her, because they’ve only been together a short time and he’s still wrapped up in sex and endorphins and hasn’t seen the worst of her insecurities. She braces herself, because as much as she wants Robin in her life, she doesn’t want to bear more responsibility than she can handle, and keeping his son out of harm’s way is rapidly shaping up to be just that.

“How about I tell you what I can forgive, and we go from there?” he says.

She pulls away, tucks her head into her arms. “Easy to say that now, when a band-aid will fix it.”

“A band-aid couldn’t fix you, and I still love you.”

He  _what_?

“Regina, if I think you’ve come to the point where you’re a danger to yourself or a danger to others, I promise you, I will address it. Calmly and rationally, as adults do. But I’m not going to punish you for what you can’t do. And if you can’t see my son running hell bent for leather and tripping over a towel, I’m not going to leave you for it.”

“It’s only going to get worse from here,” she reminds him.

“Sweetheart, I hate to brag, but I’m somewhat of an expert in my field. I know exactly where it’s going to go from here.”

“And where is that?” she snaps.

“Into the bathroom, where my sticky son has been left for far too long while you worry far too much.” He shifts away from her, and the loss of his warmth at her side throws her until he laces his fingers in hers and tugs her to her feet. Gentle, always so gentle with her. “We need to hose him down and get along with our day.”

She follows him into the bathroom, unable to stop the smile that spreads across her face as Roland wraps a skinny arm around her knees. She runs her fingers through his curls and tugs at the snarls where syrup has dried and caked his hair into a sugary, cemented mess.

“Daddy will hose you down and Regina will dry you off,” Robin promises. He presses the Star Wars towel into her hands, and she clutches it to her chest, happy to play her part.

“And then what?” Roland asks.

“And then we’ll go and have the best day ever,” Robin promises.

“Best day ever,” she agrees, still shaky, but feeling a little bit more secure.

They get Roland through his shower, dressed and out the door. She walks them to the park that Henry loved, and though she can’t see the swings or the heavy wooden pirate ship, she can hear his shouts of delight and feel him crashing into her as he begs for just five more minutes. When they finally make it home, he hums as he eats the pizza they’ve ordered, and falls asleep with his head in her lap. Robin takes him up to the guest room and tucks him in, then comes back downstairs to turn off all the lights before he tugs Regina to him and pulls her up to the bedroom.

“Best day ever,” he says as he wraps her in his arms.

Almost. “I love you,” she whispers into the darkness. His arms tighten around her and he brushes a sweet, gentle kiss along her forehead.

“I know,” he whispers in return.

_Best day ever._


	12. Chapter 12

“I was thinking,” Robin says. He's settled into Regina’s sofa, his back pressed up against the arm with Regina half asleep on top of him.

“You usually are,” she mumbles. They’d gone out for dinner at Meg’s, then to the town square for a concert by the high school band and glee club, and had just finished decaf and dessert before stretching out in her living room. She's maybe 15 minutes away from conking out, and she doesn't want to waste those 15 minutes with something as mundane as  _thinking_.

“Something specific this time, love,” he says with a smile. “It’s a long drive from my place to here, and it’s a pain for you to come to me,” an understatement, giving that it involved an Uber driver and calling ahead to make sure he was ready to meet the car and guide her up the uneven stairs in his building, “and I was thinking it might be easier if I moved a little closer to Watertown.”

Suddenly she isn't sleepy anymore. She pushes herself up against his chest and looks at him, trying desperately to make out his face in the dim light. Nothing, but she can feel his fingers run through her hair, tugging lightly at the ends of it.

“You like your place,” she says. He does – he’d told her that the first time she came over, walked her through the condo with its cherry floors and granite countertops, all redone over the course of the two years he’d lived there. It's close to his office, close to Marian, and Roland has his own room on the weekends when Robin has custody.

“I do,” he agrees. “But I like you more.”

“I don’t want you to rearrange your life to make it easier for me.” He already does enough of that, so much so that she's starting to feel that their relationship is a little bit one-sided. She asks, he provides. She doesn't ask, but he still finds ways to make her forget that she can't see. If she was feeling guilty before for being high maintenance, it's nothing compared to the boulder that lodges in her throat at the thought of him giving up his home just to make it easier to see her.

“Regina, I’m not thinking of rearranging our life to make it easier for  _you_. I’m thinking of doing it to make it easier for  _us_. I would like to not have to fight rush hour traffic to see you for dinner. I would like to not have to pack a bag every time I come over here, because there’s no way I can stop at home to get a fresh change of clothes before I go in to the office. I would like to spend more time with you, and if I shave off the commute, I can do that.” He taps her nose. “It isn’t just about you.”

 _Liar_. He isn't even a good liar, she thinks with a smile. In the year that they’ve been together, he’s done an excellent job of making things about her. It's long past time she returned the favor.

“It’s a lot of work and expense, just to be closer to me,” she says, and she can feel his chest expand as he takes a deep breath to argue with her. She stills him with a few gentle pats to his arm. “If it’s something you really want to do, maybe we should discuss it in terms of where we want to be. Geographically and…otherwise.”

“Otherwise?” he asks.

“I’m not just in this for the free medical advice,” she says with a smile. “I’m in this for the long haul. So, if you want to be closer to me, maybe we should talk about how we can both make that work. Together.”

“Together, as in together in one place?”

She nods. “If that’s something you’d like. I don’t want to rush you.”

He chuckles as he pulls her closer. God, she'll never get tired of hearing him laugh. “Sweetheart, I’d move in tomorrow if you’d let me. But we’d need to discuss your closet.”

“What’s wrong with my closet?” she huffs.

“It’s not big enough for two,” he whispers against her ear. “We can talk about how to fix that. Together.”

She likes the sound of that. She hums in agreement, settling her head on his chest once again. “Can we discuss it tomorrow? Tonight, I think I’d just like to enjoy this.”

“Oh, my love, I am.” He wraps his arms so tightly around her that she struggles for a second to breathe, then relaxes into his warmth. “I am.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it - the last chapter that was written for this particular fic. If you want more, shoot me a prompt on Tumblr and I'll try to write it!


	13. Chapter 13

It’s an adjustment, the three of them trying to figure out how to live in a small house in Allston. Robin misses his carefully chosen granite countertops; Regina misses her carved banister. She has to relearn every step of the new house, every squeak of the stairs, every bubble in the wallpaper.

Robin has to organize his cookware a good six times before Regina feels comfortable with how he sets it up in her new kitchen cabinets.

Roland has to adjust to a small yard with no trees to climb, and an even smaller bedroom in his father’s new house. He doesn’t seem to care that the new house is less than 20 minutes from his mother’s house; he wants his window seat in his father’s townhouse and the trees in Regina’s backyard.

He wants nothing to change; he’s had enough change in his life. Regina can empathize. The part of her that counted out every step from her bathroom to her bedroom hates the new house.

The part of her that loves Robin loves that she wakes up next to him every day. She doesn’t know this house yet, not as much as she wants, but she knows which area rugs might trip her up. She knows which drawer knobs are loose. She knows that, sooner rather than later, Robin is going to have to fix the leaking toilet in the guest room because the constant sound of water running through the pipes when she can’t sleep at night is enough to drive her slowly insane.

A little thing like a leaky toilet isn’t enough to tarnish Robin’s excitement over the new house. The parquet floors on the ground floor aren’t quite the cherry wood he laid by hand in his townhouse, but he likes them nonetheless. Parquet, cherry, cedar…she doesn’t really care. They all sound the same under her heels, and she loves that he’s making an effort to clear out those tricky rugs so that she won’t be tripped up by her own flair for interior design.

He knows that she likes to hear the reassuring click-clack of her heels against the floor, a reminder that she still occupies time and space. She’s still adjusting to the new count of steps, but every day she comes home, she taps her fingers against her thigh as she makes her way to the kitchen, relieved that every day it takes exactly 127 steps to get from the front door to the refrigerator. She might make an attempt at dinner, or she might dig through the menus tacked to the fridge, closing her eyes and pulling one at random so that he can order them something to eat.

She might find him in the kitchen waiting for her, and she might find that she doesn’t need to worry about it, because he’s already taken care of it. He worries about their newly installed dishwasher far more than she does. She knows how to load a dishwasher. If he wanted the fancy kind that operated on a timer, well then…he was going to have to learn how to set the timer himself.

Relationships are about give and take, she reminds herself. He gives her grief about loading the dishwasher; she takes his freshly washed t-shirts and sleeps in them. And, because he insisted on having the washer and dryer installed in their master closet, she doesn’t have to go far to dig them out.

If it were just the two of them, she’d happily take the quirks of the house, but they have Roland every other weekend. He hates the house. He hates the parquet floors. He hates his little bedroom, because it doesn’t have a window seat, and he hates the yard that doesn’t have trees he can climb.

Robin has endless patience for his son, and Regina loves children, so why the two of them bicker constantly on the weekends when they have Roland rocks her to her core.

Three months into living together, and she’s sick and tired of hugging the edge of the mattress on the weekends Roland spends with them. She’s not the kind of person to wade into parenting issues – no matter what Emma says – but she’ll be damned if she lets Robin’s son hold her hostage in her own home.

She already has too many things holding her hostage these days. And the leaky toiled may keep her awake tonight, but at the moment she can barely hear it over the wheels turning in his head. It’s either get up and try to fix the toilet herself, or get Robin to admit what’s got him sulking on the other side of the mattress.

“Robin,” she says as she prods him with her elbow. He grunts and digs his face further into the pillow.

Nice try. Even a blind woman can see that he’s trying to avoid her.

“ROBIN,” she snaps, and this time she knees him somewhere in the vicinity of his kidneys.

Her aim is still good, if his yelp of surprise is any indication. She silently thanks years of playing field hockey, then pulls his arm until he’s face-to-face with her.

“I’m awake,” he grumbles.

This close to him, she has no trouble reading his body language. He’s wound so tight she’s surprised he doesn’t spontaneously shoot from the bed.

“Roland hates it here.”

To his credit, Robin doesn’t argue. Once again, Regina feels that old familiar guilt settling in her chest, making it hard for her to breathe. She counts out her breaths – three counts in, four counts out. She’s just getting her anxiety under control when he pulls her into his arms.

“He doesn’t hate it here. He hates me.”

Admittedly, Regina is biased, but she doesn’t see how that’s possible.

 _You don’t see anything_ , that snippy little sarcastic voice in her head says.

Very funny. Also very true.

“How can he hate you? You spent a good three hours tonight reading Shel Silverstein to him. And I can’t see much, but I can see enough to know that Roland spent the entire three hours picking his nose.” She was pretty sure, anyway. “And you didn’t once tell him to knock it off.”

Robin grunted. “You’re asking me how a child can hate a parent? You? Asking me? I think we both know well enough how that happens.”

Also very true, but not in the least bit funny.

“I didn’t ask you how a child could hate a parent. It’s late, and I’m tired, and I don’t want a philosophical discussion about child rearing. I asked you how _your son_ could hate _you_.”

Robin sighs, and she’s thrown by how…utterly sad a simple exhalation of breath can be. During the course of their relationship, she’s gotten used to his relentless good cheer. As annoying as it can be, he always finds that silver lining, and the fact that he’s lost in the dark gray clouds now…well, it scares her. “Tell me,” she says. “What happened?”

Robin doesn’t answer, but merely turns away from her and punches his fist into the pillows that she bought for their new bed in their new home. Pillows that were guaranteed by the salesperson at Macy’s to hold their shape, no matter how much frustration he takes out on the synthetic goose down. He pounds the pillow into submission and rests his head on it, curling away from her.

“Robin,” she says, and this time it’s a whisper. “Talk to me.”

“I tucked him in tonight, and he told me that he wants to go home. To his mother.”

She can sympathize. Can’t say that she’s felt the same, but Marian is no Cora, and Roland is no Regina. In a fairytale book, though, she can understand a child wanting his mother.

“Is that such a bad thing?”

He huffs, then throws her very expensive pillow to the floor. “Is it such a bad thing that my son doesn’t want to sleep in my house? Yes. Yes, Regina, it’s a bad thing.”

Funny, she thought it was _their_ house, not his, but she’s smart enough to know that now is not the time to argue that particular point.

“And when you were his age, I’m guessing you felt the same.”

“It’s different.” He rolls back onto his stomach and throws an arm over his eyes, clearly done with this discussion.

“Is it?”

She knows it is, well before she feels his body shift on the bed and lean a little closer to her. Regina knows she’s skirting on the edges of sleeping in separate rooms for a few nights at least, but she can’t take miuch more of Robin’s tossing and turning and weary moans.

“I didn’t want to sleep in my father’s house because he didn’t like me, not because I didn’t like him,” he says, and he sounds so much like his son that she just wants to pull him close and let him rest his head on her chest until he drifts off again, lulled by her fingers combing through his hair, but that will hardly solve the problem.

“And did your father ever ask you why? Did he ever bother to listen to what you had to say, or did he just slam the door and then go to sleep next to your mother and keep her awake all night?”

Every muscle in his body tenses against her, and she’s afraid she’s pushed him too far, but he lets out a long breath and relaxes into the space next to her. “I’m afraid of what he’s going to say,” he admits.

“He’s already said he hates you. What could be worse than that?”

Despite his anger, fear and frustration, he chuckles. “Not much,” he admits.

Regina settles a little deeper into her pillows, tucking her body against Robin’s. “He doesn’t hate you. He hates this. I hate this. And I think if you weren’t so damn cheerful, you’d admit that you hate this. Change is hard on all of us, but on a little boy, it feels like the world is ending.”

“I don’t hate this,” he says, but she wraps her fingers around his lips, silencing him.

“Yes, you do, or else you wouldn’t be hanging off your side of the bed to avoid me on the weekends you have Roland.”

She expects him to argue, but when he doesn’t, she moves her hand from his mouth to slowly stroke the line of his neck from jaw to collarbone.

“It’s ok to hate change,” she whispers “God knows I do.”

“Yes, but you didn’t have a choice,” Robin says. He’s gearing up for a reasonable, well-thought-out argument, but she doesn’t want to hear it.

“Neither does he,” she points out.

He’s quiet for a long time. If she didn’t know him better, she’d think he fell back to sleep, but she can feel the tension in the shoulders that lay pressed to her chest. He’s working things out in his mind, trying to find the magic answer that will make this situation better for them all.

There is no magic answer, she wants to tell him. They’re just going to have to stumble through in the dark and hope they don’t get tripped up on the edges of the rugs they’ve laid down to make their little home pretty.

And if they do, they’re just going to have to believe that someone will be there to catch them when they fall.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Robin learns a new skill to help Regina.

Regina knew that she’d have to sacrifice her independence and eventually her career to her failing sight, but she’d never counted on sacrificing her vanity. Not until the day that she pokes herself in the eye with her kohl pencil, and Robin comes running into the bathroom to see what made her yell loud enough to wake the entire neighborhood.

“Let me see,” he says, trying to pull her hand away from the eye that’s rapidly tearing up and ruining her makeup job.

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine. You’re half dressed and weeping into a hand towel. Let me see.”

She huffs her irritation but lets him pull her hands away to look at her eye. “Doesn’t look like you’ve done permanent damage.”

“Well, thank God for small favors,” she mutters. She already has enough permanent damage to worry about.

As always, he ignores her salty remark. “I do believe, though, that makeup is supposed to go outside your eyes, not directly into your cornea?”

She bites back a bitchy reply, something she catches herself doing more and more lately, and she’s really starting to hate herself for it. _It’s not his fault_ , she reminds herself. Not his fault he couldn’t fix her, not his fault he couldn’t stop what was happening, not his fault that his cheerful can-do attitude sometimes makes her wish she could see better so that she could punch him right in the face.

Not his fault that something as simple as eyeliner is enough to make her want to crawl back under the covers and not come out again. Ever.

“You’re angry.”

She is. These days, she’s almost always angry. She can barely stand her own bitter company, and the fact that Robin not only tolerates it but tries to make her feel better makes her even more angry. Sometimes she understands why her father, with his patience and his kind words, made her mother such a bitch when she was growing up, and she hates herself even more because she’s afraid that she’s just one poke in the eye with a kohl pencil away from turning into full-blown Cora Mills.  

“I am angry,” she sighs, “but not at you.”

“I should hope not. I’ve barely gotten out of bed. I haven’t had a chance yet to do something to make you truly angry.”

“Well, it’s still early,” she says, with a laugh that sounds far too forced to be convincing.

“Tell me what I can do. You know I’d do anything for you.”

That’s the problem, isn’t it? “I know you would do anything for me,” she sighs. And she’d do the same for him, but the reality is, he can’t do the one thing she needs him to do – stop her from going completely blind by the age of 40. And she can’t do the one thing he needs her to do – stop feeling so sorry for herself that it overwhelms everything else around her. They have this new house, this little family that they’re slowly building with Roland, and two careers that require every inch of their focus. It should be the fucking American dream, and instead of enjoying it, she’s punishing him for what she doesn’t have rather than for what she does.

Why isn’t he sick of her? _She’s_ sick of her, so why isn’t he?

 He’s still waiting for an answer, one she honestly doesn’t know how to give. “Can you run some cold water on this towel?” He does, and she presses it to her eye. “Thanks. Just…give me a few minutes?”

And because she asked him, he does that too. If she spends those minutes crying into a cool, damp towel, he doesn’t need to know that. Once she’s done, she wipes her face with the towel and starts over, compensating for her unsteady hand with a very light touch of her makeup.

Thank God she doesn’t stab her corneas with her eyeshadow brushes. He’s already seen enough of her tears for one day, and it’s not even 8am.

***

She makes it through the rest of the day, and the week, without having another meltdown. And thank God, because they have Roland this weekend, and he’s still struggling with change, and she doesn’t want her inability to be an adult to interfere with Robin’s ability to parent his son.

It helps that the bathroom lights are brighter now. She’s glad that she can’t see, because judging by the change from _soft light_ to _surface of the sun_ , she’d be terrified of picking out every single wrinkle and crease in her face. It’s a good thing Robin isn’t nearly as vain as she is, or she’d be the one spending her mornings picking his ego up off the floor.

They make it through the weekend with a minimum of tears – this time, only from Roland – and when she wakes on Monday morning, she’s surprised that the anger that’s been her near-constant companion has gone somewhere else for the day.

_I can do this_ , she reminds herself. She makes it into the bathroom and through her shower without dropping the soap, and if she skips shaving her legs, well, Robin doesn’t seem the type to be put off by a little bit of stubble. And it’s a good thing too, because she’s had to suffer through beard burn on enough delicate parts of her body that she knows her anger at _that_ would be absolutely justified.

She’s just pulling the magnification mirror out when she feels him behind her. “Let me help,” he says.

“I don’t need help.” She tells him that at least six times a day, sometimes with affection, but usually with irritation, but this morning she means it. She doesn’t need help. He has a tough day ahead of him – two eye surgeries and a consult with a cantankerous glaucoma patient, and she doesn’t want him wasting time to babysit her while she puts on her makeup.

“I want to help.” He drags the hamper next to her stool and sits, turning her face to him so he can study her under the new vanity lights.

“Now first, primer.”

Dear God, he’s actually digging through her makeup. “Robin, please-“

“No, no, I spent a large part of last Thursday watching makeup tutorials on YouTube. If I could make it through medical school, I can at least do this.”

“You did _what_?”

“My lecture at BU was cancelled. I had some free time.”

“And you used it to watch makeup tutorials? Robin, that’s the stupidest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

His hands smooth over her face. God, she hopes it’s her primer and not some of that expensive night cream her mother insisted on buying her. Wrinkles be damned, she’s not putting snail mucus on her face.

“You need to set your bar lower, Regina. I’ve heard far stupider things. Usually from you, when you’re insisting that you’re fine when you’re not.”

_Well, he has a point there._

“Now, concealer.” He hums, then tilts her chin this way and that. “I don’t see anything that needs concealing. So let’s move on to foundation, shall we?”

He does, dabbing at her face with one of her very expensive makeup blenders, then brushing her with blush and powder, and finally following up with eyeliner and shadow. She closes her eyes and let him pamper her, enjoying how he hums with delight when he gets her contouring right and his little huffs of frustration when he accidentally smears mascara on the bridge of her nose.

“I read something about this,” he mutters. “Q-tips and baby oil.”

She reaches out and finds his wrist, stopping him from digging in her vanity drawer. “Just wait for it to dry and scrape it off.”

And because she asked him to, he waits, then flicks a fingernail against her skin and wipes away the offending smudge. “There. Now you’re perfect.”

“I look like an 80s hooker, don’t I?”

He laughs out loud at that. “Have you so little faith in me?”

Sometimes she does, when he puts up with her moods and her insecurities and doesn’t kick her out of their house when she’s the worst possible version of herself. She doesn’t have enough faith that he’ll see this through, that he’ll do what her father never could and decide that being alone is better than living with a woman who’s never satisfied.

Today, though, she’s satisfied. Even if she looks like she could star in a Madonna video from the early 80s, she doesn’t care. “I have so much faith in you, it would scare you.”

Robin kisses her nose, careful not to disturb his handiwork. “I could say the same about you.”

She tucks that comment away, close to her heart, somewhere she can easily find it when she’s angry and depressed and wondering if any of this is ever going to be ok. And it’s a good thing, too, because Mary Margaret’s first words when she arrives for lunch are, “Wow, you look great! Have you done something new with your makeup? I love it.”

“Me too,” Regina says through gritted teeth. She does love it, but she’s going to tuck that comment away too. The next time Robin annoys her, she’s going to take it out on Mary Margaret. She never thought she’d ever love anything as much as she loved tormenting her stepsister until Robin showed up, but that doesn’t mean she’s not still going to have some fun at Mary Margaret’s expense.

It beats being angry any day.


	15. Chapter 15

As much as Regina Mills hates to admit defeat, she can’t deny the fact that she is, at this point, almost totally blind. She’s skated through with all her little coping mechanisms for long enough, but she can’t read on her iPad anymore – the screen just isn’t big enough. She can make out shapes on the TV, but as far as she knows, SpongeBob SquarePants is guarding Winterfell and Sofia the First just admitted to poisoning Joffrey.

It makes for an amusing show in her head, but the reality is…she’s out of time and options with regards to her vision, and she needs to accept the fact that her new reality needs to come with some new tools.

“Are you going to eat your muffin, or are you just going to pick apart its corpse?” Robin asks.

She’s so distracted, she hasn’t even noticed that her breakfast is in crumbs on the plate in front of her. She picks at the bits of streusel topping under her nails. “I guess I’m not hungry.”

“You don’t say.” She can hear the humor in his voice as he pulls her plate away. A swish, a thunk, and the clattering of china tells her that he’s loading the dishwasher, and she has to fight to keep her mouth shut, rather than reminding him that the plates go on the bottom rack.

“You remember those alternatives that we discussed at my first appointment? I think I’m ready to hear them now.”

His hands meet hers, pulling her fingers away from worrying her manicure into oblivion. “Are you sure?”

Regina nods. “It’s time to be an adult about this. I think…I think I’m ready to start learning Braille.”

***

When Robin comes home from work the next day, he hands her a small package. “This might help,” he says. She tugs off the shrink wrap and runs her fingers over smooth cardboard, the bottom half with a series of raised bumps. “I figured while Roland is learning to read, you can help him.”

He brought her Braille flashcards. Regina’s breath catches in her throat. She lifts the top card to her face, squints at it, tries to make out the shapes and colors, then admits defeat and drops it onto the stack. “Cat?” she asks.

“Table,” he says. “Four legs, though, so…close.”

She can’t help but laugh.

“The alphabet cards are in there too.” He picks up the stack and shuffles them. “Here we are. Start with A, and we’ll go from there.”

“I used to read French fluently, you know,” she reminds him.

“Well, then, you have a head start when you start reading Braille in French.”

“ _Chat_?” she asks.

“Quatre…legs.? Close enough.”

She works through the cards every evening, familiarizing herself with the raised patterns. On the weekends she has Roland, she quizzes him on the cards, asking him to spell out the letters as she follows along with her fingers. For Roland, every new word is a discovery. For Regina, it’s a reminder of how much she’s lost. Still, she tries to stay positive.

She has a master’s degree, after all. Surely she can handle this.

***

Once she has the hang of the alphabet, Robin brings her workbooks. She doesn’t want him to be so invested in helping her learn Braille, not when he’s already so invested in helping her do everything else, but she can’t deny that he’s been beyond helpful. Especially in the first few weeks, when she’d slammed the cards down on the coffee table and insisted that this dog was too damn old to learn new tricks.

_“Nonsense,” Robin said. “You’re just too impatient. You’re learning an entirely new language. Give it time.”_

_“Time?” she snorted. “All I’m giving it is time. Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to have to pick apart each letter in a word? Because that’s what I have to do here.”_

_“It won’t always be like that,” he reminded her. “Right now you and Roland are sounding out the words. Eventually, you’ll learn to recognize letter combinations with your fingers, just as you did with your eyes when you learned to read.”_

_Robin picked up the deck, and she could hear the fanning of the cards as he shuffled it. “Table. Dog. Bear. Apple,” he paused briefly, “and cat.”_

_“You’re cheating,” she grumbled, more than a little annoyed at how quickly he read off the words. “You can see the cards.”_

_He picked up her hand and guided it to his face. He rested her fingertips against his closed eyes, then let her go to dig through the stack again. “Zebra. Lemon. Igloo.”_

_“You know Braille?” she asked._

_“Sweetheart, when you specialize in disorders that lead to the loss of vision, you pick up a thing or two.”_

_She let her fingers drift down across the planes of his face until she was resting her palm against his cheek. “You never stop surprising me, you know that?”_

_He turned into her hand and kissed her palm. “That’s the idea.”_

She pulls the first workbook into her lap and flips through the pages with a sigh. She feels like she’s sixteen again and sulking because she has so much homework, but she dutifully rests her fingers against the page and starts working her way through the raised dots.

“Cat!” she cries out.

“We have to teach you a new word,” he replies, and she can hear the grin in his voice.

“No, not c-a-t! Cat! I recognized it! Cat!” She’s so pleased with her own progress that she flings the workbook aside and throws herself at Robin. Suddenly, she’s sixteen again, and kissing a cute boy is far more important than worrying about finishing her homework.

***

“Ready for the next step?” he asks.

Sometimes, Robin is a worse taskmaster than her mother, and that’s saying something. “I suppose?”

He places a bag in her hands, and she reaches in and pulls out a heavy volume. “This isn’t another workbook.”

“No, it’s not.”

She runs her finger across the cover, taking a few minutes to sound out the unfamiliar words of the title. “One Hundred Years of Solitude?”

“It’s your favorite book. I know you’ve read it enough times to have it practically memorized, so I thought reading familiar words in Braille might help build up your vocabulary?”

“This is a big step up from ‘the dog buries a bone in the yard,’” she mutters.

Robin leans in and presses a kiss to her temple. “Something tells me you can handle it. Once you’re done with that, we’ll start moving on to Braille books in French.”

She can hear his footsteps retreating down the hall as he heads to the kitchen. “You know, since I’m learning a new language, it’s only fair that you do too. I’ll get you some French flash cards.”

“Chat,” he calls back. “See, I’m already ahead of you.”

***

He wasn’t kidding about books in French, she learned, when he dumped Les Miserables on her lap. She wasn’t kidding about him learning French, and they trade off chapters, reading aloud to each other. Listening to Robin butcher French pronunciation sends her into fits of laughter, and she knows it annoys him a little bit, but she can’t help herself. It’s nice to have this one thing that she does better than him. It’s nice to get the chance to teach him something new for a change, even if he absolutely hates it when she corrects him.

He hates it, but he reads aloud anyway, because he knows that it makes her happy.

They’re in bed when they finish the final chapter, her head resting on his thigh as he lazily runs his fingers through her hair. She should be correcting him, but she’s just so…happy and comfortable that she can’t be bothered. He snaps the book closed, and she can hear it land with a heavy thud on the night table.

“Next time, I pick the book,” he says.

“Don Quixote in Spanish?” She burrows a little bit more into his lap. “At least then we’d both understand it.”

“Sí, favor,” he says, and she fights back a laugh. Even in Spanish, a language that he speaks well enough to get by, there’s no hiding his British accent.

“Tráemela,” she says.  _Bring it to me_. A story about a man tilting at windmills, facing impossible odds but dreaming nonetheless – it’s been years since she read it, but something tells her she’ll appreciate it more this go-round.

She’s expecting a new book when he comes home the next night, but instead he hands her an envelope. “What is this?” She runs her fingernail under the flap, tugging it loose and slipping out the card inside.

“I thought it’s time we embark on a project where we can both learn something,” he answers.

She runs her fingers over the Braille letters. Definitely Spanish this time, she realizes, and she can’t wait to tell her father that Robin speaks his mother’s native language. She puts the letters together, one after the other, until the words click in her head and she drops the note.

“Quieres casarte conmigo?” she asks, dumbfounded.

“Sí, quiero casarte,” he answers.

Casarme.  _Marry me_. She’s in jeans and a t-shirt, her feet bare and her hair pulled up in a messy ponytail, and he’s asking her to marry him? She doesn’t even know what to say, but as usual, her mouth moves long before her brain can catch up to the reality of what’s happening. “You’re asking me to marry you, in Spanish, and in Braille? Couldn’t you just get down on one knee like a normal person?”

He pulls her close enough that her body is flush with his, then drops down, her hands still clutched in his. “This is me, on my knee. Regina, will you marry me?”

She wants to answer him, but she’s finding it a little bit difficult to breathe.  _Yes_ , her brain screams, but the rest of her is paralyzed with shock.

“Veux-tu m'épouser? I learned it in French, German, Chinese and even Tagalog,” he says. “You tell me how you want to hear it, and I’ll ask you.”

She’s more than happy to hear it in any and every language, to read it in Braille, to hear it spoken through her voice-text app, to learn Morse Code if that’s what he wants. She could answer in every form of yes she knows, but instead she drops to her knees and pulls his face to hers, kissing him with everything in her, every emotion that leaves the great romantic poets in the dust.

Sometimes words are overrated.

**Author's Note:**

> Per request on Tumblr, Six Senses. This was only ever supposed to be a prompt, but it turned into a multi-chapter fic with so many excellent prompts. It's not done - it may never be done - but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless.


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